Was wondering on peoples opinions on Solus ditching GTK in favour of Enlightenment?
Aren’t some of the library’s in Enlightenment really old? To run enlightenment alongside the modern packages they seem to favour would seem to be dependency hell, unless they are going to do a lot of work upstream?
To be fair, they only need to get Budgie working on top of Enlightenment. But it still sounds like far too much work for a small team.
Am expecting to hear someone say it was an April Fools joke or something but then April was months ago…
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I’ve run Enlightenment on openSUSE Tumbleweed just fine. I don’t like it much but I didn’t find any issues with running it alongside Tumbleweeds packages.
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I’ve used Solus as my daily driver on my laptops for several years now. I love Solus and have not seen any reason to change. However, I run it with the Plasma DE.
I used Enlightenment back briefly while I ran Yellow Dog Linux and I used it again on an Eee PC but that netbook wasn’t my daily driver.
I haven’t used it recently enough to speak to its quality now but I remember it being very NIH and chunky looking but well built. It definitely seems like a weird pivot.
tl;dr Solus devs in charge must really hate Qt.
They gave their reasons for dropping GTK which seem a little weak to me, but whatever, it is their project, their choice. Solus has always prided itself on being a boutique distro and a little different from everything else, so this certainly fits that theme.
I will be curious myself, as back in the day I compiled Enlightenment when it was just a window manager to look cool with bitmaps terminal backgrounds.
Pretty sure EFL is the underlying “toolkit” and elementary is the window manager.
I understand their reasons for dumping GTK. I read Joshua’s blog, (Building An Alternative Ecosystem - Solus Forum), and based on his various reasons. The most pernicious possibly being the changes to enforce the Adwaita theme which essentially eliminates developer and user choice in interface guidelines. I know that the Plasma DE team have done a lot to ensure that GTK2 and GTK3 based apps look like first-class citizens along Qt based applications but GTK4 does break that again. It doesn’t seem like there has been much cooperation in resolving this either.
I think it makes perfect sense for the Solus team in the future of Budgie to look at other toolkits. EFL looks interesting and having more work done on that isn’t a bad thing at all. If Gnome doesn’t want to play nice, that is their choice. It is their project, they can do with it what they want. Forcing people in to anything isn’t ever a good long term strategy.
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