Hello GoLinux, Steve, and Hendrik! Good to see you all again, in spite
of past disagreements.
This is just my opinion, but I don't see XFCE's future being so grim.
I think GTK's future outside of Gnome is the concern. It's been my
observation that GTK has become very Gnome-centric, and a number of
projects have abandoned it, in favor of other kits. There has been talk
of GTK4, but that has been going around for a number of years now, with
nothing final. Once Wayland replaces X11, we might actually have a
concern over GTK2, but that has been dragging on for years also. GTK2
is going to maintained by RHEL for at least another 4 years, and
probably by the community for far longer than 2020. It is about as
mature as it is going to get. Given that, I don't think XFCE has any
real danger of being rushed.
If XFCE actually moves to GTK3 as they planned, then I think it is good
for them. If the devs strip out a few features, then I don't see it as a
great loss, because of its dependence on GTK. In my opinion, it is
better to lose a feature or two than leave them broken or unmaintained.
As I see it, they will most certainly have to change a few things to
accommodate GTK3. It is likely to retain the most used features. The
current XFCE has a number of features, applets, etc that are poorly
designed, buggy, or not well maintained anyway. If a few go away or
receive some love, all the better.
The best thing to do if someone wanted to have a voice in it, is
contributing to XFCE.
On another topic, LXDE has been replaced with LXQt. It's my feeling
that LXQt is not quite ready to completely replace LXDE yet. Like XFCE,
LXDE uses GTK. The developers abandoned work on LXDE in favor of LXQt,
saying that that something akin to GTK3 being disappointing and that
switching to Qt was preferable.
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