How to determine whether installed Pale Moon version is GTK2 or GTK3? Topic is solved

[Tharthan]

Operating system: Linux Mint XFCE 21.3 Virginia
Browser version: 33.0.0
32-bit or 64-bit browser?: 64-bit
Browser theme (if not default): Default
Installed add-ons: Autoplay Toggle (Non-Restartless), butWhyMod 1.7, Decentraleyes 1.4.3, Dismiss the Overlay 1.0.7, Greasemonkey for Pale Moon 3.31.4, Modify HTTP Response 1.3.8, OpenDownload² 4.2.1, Pale Moon Commander 3.0.1, Palefill Web Technologies Polyfill 1.28, PDF Viewer 2.3.240, Pure URL 3.4, Reader View 2.2.0, uBlock Origin 1.16.4.30, uTube 33.0
Installed plugins: (about:plugins): None.

Long story short, when I first installed Pale Moon (and Epyrus) to my new Linux Mint computer a number of months ago, I did so manually——to folders in "/bin". I was largely unfamiliar with how to best do things on GNU/Linux, so I didn't realise that the PPA was the better way to go.

By manually updating Pale Moon with the root account, I have been able to keep stably running Pale Moon up to this point. However, in trying to update to Pale Moon version 33.0.1, the manual update for whatever reason seems to break Pale Moon and Pale Moon won't run afterwards.

So I have decided to switch over to stevepusser's PPA. But I don't remember whether the version of Pale Moon that I manually installed was the GTK2 version or the GTK3 version of Pale Moon for GNU/Linux. So I don't know which PPA I ought to use.

How do I determine which version (GTK2 or GTK3) is installed? Or is it possible to simply move my existing profile and the like over to either one of the PPA installations without a problem?

[trava90]

You can look at about:buildconfig to see if you are running the GTK2 or GTK3 build. Under "Configure options", look for --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtkX (where X will be the version you're using).

That said, your existing profile will work with either build. The GTK version doesn't have any impact to the profile.

[athenian200]

As someone who has compiled Pale Moon on Unix a lot, there's an even easier way to tell... on GTK3, the address bar tends to appear taller than on GTK2. It's pretty obvious once you know what you're looking for.

But like trava90 said, it really doesn't matter what you use. I only provide a GTK3 version of Epyrus, so that's definitely GTK3. And GTK2 is... getting pretty long in the tooth, so I wouldn't recommend it. Not many modern distros support it, and it won't integrate properly with MATE or Cinnamon.

[ron_1]

And GTK2 is... getting pretty long in the tooth, so I wouldn't recommend it. Not many modern distros support it, and it won't integrate properly with MATE or Cinnamon.

Not sure what you mean by that. I've been happily using the gtk2 version of Pale Moon with Mate for the last 10 years and everything works fine. (I prefer the looks of gtk2 over gtk3 any day of the week.)

[athenian200]

Not sure what you mean by that. I've been happily using the gtk2 version of Pale Moon with Mate for the last 10 years and everything works fine. (I prefer the looks of gtk2 over gtk3 any day of the week.)

The GTK2 version will keep working if you need it, but the reality is that MATE is moving away from GTK2 and all the stuff GTK2 integrates with is slowly going away. That doesn't mean GTK2 applications will stop working, but it does mean that if you care about little things like desktop integration or having certain aspects of the desktop theme apply to Pale Moon, that stuff may stop working. MATE has better support for it than modern GNOME, but it is unfortunately going in the same direction. So if you like MATE's GTK2 integration, you might want to be cautious about upgrading sooner than necessary, there's no telling when that may become a problem.

If you use Pale Moon with a custom theme, it really doesn't matter. GTK isn't a core component of Pale Moon anyway, and honestly we could probably just render to a Cairo or Xlib surface directly if we really wanted to (though it would be a non-trivial amount of work). The only reason to use GTK at all is to provide native widgets, desktop integration, and file associations. Oh, and NPAPI plugin compatibility, the plugins are built against it.

[ron_1]

Off-topic:
On the Devuan forums someone is forking Mate/Gnome, so IF his fork flies, gtk2 will still have a desktop environment "home."

[athenian200]

Off-topic:
On the Devuan forums someone is forking Mate/Gnome, so IF his fork flies, gtk2 will still have a desktop environment "home."

Off-topic:
I wish him luck. Maybe he could work with mrnhmath on that, I think he wanted to do a fork like that as well.

[Tharthan]

Thank you to trava90 (and stevepusser, for the PPA! The switch over to that from manual installation wasn't difficult at all once I figured out what I needed to do!)

You can look at about:buildconfig to see if you are running the GTK2 or GTK3 build. Under "Configure options", look for --enable-default-toolkit=cairo-gtkX (where X will be the version you're using).

Thank you. It seems that I was running the GTK2 build.

That said, your existing profile will work with either build. The GTK version doesn't have any impact to the profile.

That's good to know. I wasn't sure whether it would be one of those situations where not having the exact version matching up would cause problems.

And thank you to athenian200 for your advice about GTK3. I didn't see it soon enough to make sure to install the GTK3 repository over the GTK2 repository, but in the future, it is good to know that switching to the GTK3 repository ought to be relatively easy.

[ron_1]

Off-topic:

Off-topic:
I wish him luck. Maybe he could work with mrnhmath on that, I think he wanted to do a fork like that as well.

Actually, that's him. https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=6248
It's hard to tell if there's anything going on with it, though.

[mrnhmath]

Off-topic:

Actually, that's him. https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=6248
It's hard to tell if there's anything going on with it, though.

Off-topic:
I'm currently on vacation. OpenMATE is still up, but I don't think I'll be hosting a git repo for the sources, not only because it's been a very laborious process of keeping track of changes from different eras of GNOME code, but the bitching about GitHub in the thread put me off a little.

[Basilisk-Dev]

Off-topic:
I added this to the Help->About Window in Basilisk specifically to avoid topics like this.

@Moonchild It might be worth it to provide this information on Pale Moon's about window as well.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:
Can you please point me to the commit you used so i can look at porting/picking it across? No need to reinvent the wheel.

[athenian200]

It might be worth it to provide this information on Pale Moon's about window as well.[/offtopic]

Off-topic:
I could have sworn we had this already, actually. I was almost going to tell him to check the "about" dialog before realizing we actually don't have it there. I don't know why I thought we did... but it looks like you put it there now. I was thinking that on Windows, we display whether it's 32 or 64 bit, but on Linux we display whether it's GTK2 or GTK3. I would put it there for Epyrus, but I don't provide a GTK2 build...

[Basilisk-Dev]

Off-topic:
Can you please point me to the commit you used so i can look at porting/picking it across? No need to reinvent the wheel.

Off-topic:
The initial commit where I added this is here but I've since changed it to use the MOZ_WIDGET_GTK preprocessor macro instead of using appconst to check for Linux.

The current version is here, line 71-75