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dennisn
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 01 Aug 2004
Posts: 119
Location: Montreal, Canada
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 Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2022 1:17 pm Post subject: Opinion about resisting bloat |
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I recently noticed that yet another of my beloved apps was undignifiedly removed from portage, media-gfx/gqview. It was (is) a great speedy *gtk2* image viewer. media-gfx/geeqie replaced it, which literally uses TWICE as much ram, and twice as much cpu and feels noticeably more sluggish here to load up and use - twice the resource usage for absolutely no gain in functionality.
I don't think there was a good reason for this removal(?), just an arbitrary hoop that some gentoo (and gtk) devs bullied app devs to jump through. The consequence of this gentoo/gtk power trip, is users suffer. Our machines become slower and less capable. Less hardware is able to run Gentoo.
I thought one of the great things about Gentoo was that it was able to run on almost anything - but now there seems to be a trend to only focus on The Latest Thing, so it's no different than any other major distro that only focuses on the latest bleeding edge (and perhaps backdoored) hardware. Is everyone on "older" hardware using another distro? Maybe gtk(2) apps were never meant to care about this issue, maybe the problem is the gtk community - they're already doing gtk 4 or 5 or whatever else to try to add more bloat for bloat's sake.
(Don't even get me started on the nightmare of "modern" browsers.) |
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fedeliallalinea
Administrator
Joined: 08 Mar 2003
Posts: 30965
Location: here
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| Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2022 2:02 pm Post subject: |
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First, this program is dead upstream, from GQview website:
- stable release GQview 2.0.4 - December 2, 2006
- development release GQview 2.1.5 - December 3, 2006
Second gtk2 is EOL this means that no more updates (including security updates) will be made, may also no longer compile in future versions of gcc.
Do you think it would be the gentoo developers who should continue the update work on gtk2?
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Hammett
Apprentice
Joined: 26 Jan 2005
Posts: 231
Location: Barcelona, Catalonia
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| Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2022 6:39 pm Post subject: Re: Opinion about resisting bloat |
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| dennisn wrote: | I recently noticed that yet another of my beloved apps was undignifiedly removed from portage, media-gfx/gqview. It was (is) a great speedy *gtk2* image viewer. media-gfx/geeqie replaced it, which literally uses TWICE as much ram, and twice as much cpu and feels noticeably more sluggish here to load up and use - twice the resource usage for absolutely no gain in functionality.
I don't think there was a good reason for this removal(?), just an arbitrary hoop that some gentoo (and gtk) devs bullied app devs to jump through. The consequence of this gentoo/gtk power trip, is users suffer. Our machines become slower and less capable. Less hardware is able to run Gentoo.
I thought one of the great things about Gentoo was that it was able to run on almost anything - but now there seems to be a trend to only focus on The Latest Thing, so it's no different than any other major distro that only focuses on the latest bleeding edge (and perhaps backdoored) hardware. Is everyone on "older" hardware using another distro? Maybe gtk(2) apps were never meant to care about this issue, maybe the problem is the gtk community - they're already doing gtk 4 or 5 or whatever else to try to add more bloat for bloat's sake.
(Don't even get me started on the nightmare of "modern" browsers.) |
Well, that was quite heated.... I do not think there is an evil behind those removes... in fact, I do appreciate old, unmaintained software is removed from portage. I was also a user of gqview, and moved to geeqie. Haven't noticed any speed difference. Also please note that CPU/RAM is orders of magnitude faster that what you perceive the geeqie is using more compared to gqview. It uses a bit more RAM? fair enough, I still have plenty free to be used.
Don't get me wrong, I am also a bit OCD about lean systems, but for me is much much more grievous the current web-browser situation than anything else, and the focus should be on those monsters and not geeqie.
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I don't fear the people. I fear the demon inside them. |
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gorg86
Apprentice
Joined: 20 May 2011
Posts: 299
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| Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2022 2:12 am Post subject: |
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gqview is bloat, I use feh.
gpicview is still in portage, maybe try that one? |
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Genone
Retired Dev
Joined: 14 Mar 2003
Posts: 9538
Location: beyond the rim
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| Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2022 4:18 pm Post subject: Re: Opinion about resisting bloat |
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| dennisn wrote: | | I thought one of the great things about Gentoo was that it was able to run on almost anything - but now there seems to be a trend to only focus on The Latest Thing, so it's no different than any other major distro that only focuses on the latest bleeding edge (and perhaps backdoored) hardware. Is everyone on "older" hardware using another distro? Maybe gtk(2) apps were never meant to care about this issue, maybe the problem is the gtk community - they're already doing gtk 4 or 5 or whatever else to try to add more bloat for bloat's sake. |
You're mistaken. Gentoo allows you to make it work on almost any hardware supported by the Linux kernel. But its up to you to actually accomplish it. Also Gentoo is not responsible for upstream applications being abandoned. Nor does it tell you what applications to use, at most it gives your recommendations.
gqview has been dead for over a decade, gtk2 development also ended many years ago. You're free to continue using it if you really want, you don't need to rely on the main repository for that (that's the freedom Gentoo provides you with). But then any issues (build problems, incompabilities, security issues, ...) with it become your responsibility (that's the burden of freedom).
If you dislike how gtk is developing, then maybe you should take it up with its developers. |
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dmpogo
Advocate
Joined: 02 Sep 2004
Posts: 3267
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2022 4:04 am Post subject: Re: Opinion about resisting bloat |
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| Genone wrote: | | dennisn wrote: | | I thought one of the great things about Gentoo was that it was able to run on almost anything - but now there seems to be a trend to only focus on The Latest Thing, so it's no different than any other major distro that only focuses on the latest bleeding edge (and perhaps backdoored) hardware. Is everyone on "older" hardware using another distro? Maybe gtk(2) apps were never meant to care about this issue, maybe the problem is the gtk community - they're already doing gtk 4 or 5 or whatever else to try to add more bloat for bloat's sake. |
You're mistaken. Gentoo allows you to make it work on almost any hardware supported by the Linux kernel. But its up to you to actually accomplish it. Also Gentoo is not responsible for upstream applications being abandoned. Nor does it tell you what applications to use, at most it gives your recommendations.
gqview has been dead for over a decade, gtk2 development also ended many years ago. You're free to continue using it if you really want, you don't need to rely on the main repository for that (that's the freedom Gentoo provides you with). But then any issues (build problems, incompabilities, security issues, ...) with it become your responsibility (that's the burden of freedom).
If you dislike how gtk is developing, then maybe you should take it up with its developers. |
well, gtk2 will be hanging around as long as gimp is using it |
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Hu
Administrator
Joined: 06 Mar 2007
Posts: 21722
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| Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2022 4:04 pm Post subject: |
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| gimp-2.99.10-r2 and later appear to depend on gtk+3, not gtk+2. However, those are currently no-keyword ebuilds. |
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guru meditation
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 18 Mar 2018
Posts: 141
Location: Planet Earth
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| Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2022 9:48 pm Post subject: |
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Sylpheed is using GTK2, Pale Moon is using GTK2 (at least the binaries), LXDE is using GTK2 (and I will til I die, the GTK3+ scroll bars make me hit the ceiling every time)…
"No update within x years" does not mean it is not working. For example, I use an ancient mail server that used to be around in the Gentoo repository. With recent updates of glibc 2.34/5, I've had a heap of trouble with segfauklts on modern Apache and MariaDB, but none with the mail server.
If the maintainers want to scrap the dead wood in order to keep the main repository lean and neat, I suggest to move the "old dragons" to its own overlay, and not just delete them. |
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Hu
Administrator
Joined: 06 Mar 2007
Posts: 21722
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| Posted: Thu Nov 17, 2022 11:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Nothing is ever truly deleted in the era of git. Old ebuilds can always be recovered from the attic, and requiring users to get them from there instead of having an overlay of abandoned ebuilds makes it clearer that these are unsupported and may not even work without adjustment by whoever wants to recover them. |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54312
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Fri Nov 18, 2022 5:14 pm Post subject: |
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guru meditation,
All the ebuilds that were ever in Gentoo CVS are now in git.
The attic is gone as that was a CVS artefact.
Choose the right git repo, there are two now and you can do something like Historical Gentoo
The hard bit is finding the old distfiles.
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NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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gorg86
Apprentice
Joined: 20 May 2011
Posts: 299
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| Posted: Sun Nov 20, 2022 3:19 am Post subject: |
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media-gfx/xzgv just got masked  |
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