Arch Linux

akb825

Member

Registered: 2011-03-27

Posts: 87

[SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

I am using Xfce, and after updating today I noticed that the Gnome applications I have installed that are now running under gtk3 look like crap. I followed the instructions in this thread (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=116451), but there are two major issues. First, I must set my Xfce theme to Adwaita, which ends up looking like Clearlooks. Second is gtk3 applications look completely different from all of the gtk2 applications, since even though Adwaita looks like Clearlooks in gtk2, it looks completely different in gtk3.

As applications get ported over to gtk3, I fear that my desktop will get steadily more and more inconsistent. Is there any way to get gtk3 and gtk2 playing together nicely?

Additionally, whenever I start a gtk application, I get the following error message:

(gvim:24151): Gtk-WARNING **: GTK+ module /usr/lib/gtk-3.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so cannot be loaded.
GTK+ 2.x symbols detected. Using GTK+ 2.x and GTK+ 3 in the same process is not supported.
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"

Since this happens with gvim, it gets very annoying...

Last edited by akb825 (2011-05-15 20:29:58)

wonder

Developer

From: Bucharest, Romania

Registered: 2006-07-05

Posts: 5,941

Website

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/23655

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akb825

Member

Registered: 2011-03-27

Posts: 87

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

Will fixing that bug make it so gtk3 applications will look like gtk2 applications, or does that only mean that gtk3 themes will get the default Adwaita theme without additional configuration?

Leonid.I

Member

From: Aethyr

Registered: 2009-03-22

Posts: 999

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

There seems to be a mixture of two problems:
(1) Applications like evince, evolution, ... expect a gtk3 theme, they even do not depend on gtk2. On my xfce4 machine I have a CDE-like gtk2 theme. Of course, evince looks bad. The mentioned forum thread does not help, because ...well, I don't have any gtk3 themes installed. I think this can only be fixed, if entire xfce4 migrates to gtk3, or there is a theme, which looks identical for both gtk2 and gtk3...
(2) There are no error messages, when starting gvim or evince (and I don't have any other gnome apps), because I don't have libcanberra. So, I am inclined to think that this second problem is actually an issue with gtk3 apps, and not xfce4 itself, as the mentined bugreport suggests.

is it possible to recompile evince3 against gtk2? If not, we might have to use aur/evince-gtk...

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Arch Linux is more than just GNU/Linux -- it's an adventure
pkill -9 systemd

MkFly

Member

From: Mars

Registered: 2009-12-10

Posts: 141

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

gtk3 applications look completely different from all of the gtk2 applications, since even though Adwaita looks like Clearlooks in gtk2, it looks completely different in gtk3

Ugh, that they do.

Ideally, I would love to have a way to force GTK3 apps to use my GTK2 theme, but I doubt that's going to happen.

akb825

Member

Registered: 2011-03-27

Posts: 87

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

After looking into it a bit more, it looks like the main issue is having themes that are implemented both for gtk3 and gtk2. There are only a few that are implemented for both currently, but most of them are incorrect and the only one that looks correct in both is High Contrast. It looks like we pretty much have to wait until more themes come out, and even then our choices will probably be pretty slim.

MkFly

Member

From: Mars

Registered: 2009-12-10

Posts: 141

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

All I really want is for GTK3 apps to look like my GTK2 apps.

I'm very, very happy with my GTK2 theme and love the way the widgets look.  The widgets as drawn by GTK3 (with Adwaita) look like garbage.  Having CSS support for themes is great, but it means that lot more work has to be done if you want to modify it.

If I could somehow use the Clearlooks GTK2 engine with GTK3, I could at least give GTK3 apps something that doesn't look terrible.

The upcoming GNOME3 release is what made me switch to Xfce a number of months ago (I hated the way it looked), looks like they got me in the end with GTK3. >:-(

GTK2 widgets (which I love) on top, GTK3 on bottom:

Last edited by MkFly (2011-05-02 04:25:53)

yngwin

Member

Registered: 2009-05-08

Posts: 67

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

This is the same kind of mess as KDE apps were in in the early days of KDE4. It will take some time for things to be smoothened out. For now, I simply avoid gtk3.

MkFly

Member

From: Mars

Registered: 2009-12-10

Posts: 141

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

This is the same kind of mess as KDE apps were in in the early days of KDE4. It will take some time for things to be smoothened out. For now, I simply avoid gtk3.

Yeah, I think that's what I'm going to be doing for a while.  I've downgraded to cached, GTK2 versions of the only GTK3 apps that I use: rhythmbox, gedit, gthumb and a few others, and added them to IgnorePkg in pacman.conf.

I hope to see some kind of GTK2 theme emulation for GTK3 someday ... if Qt4 can do it, why not GTK3?

Last edited by MkFly (2011-05-02 07:06:26)

Leonid.I

Member

From: Aethyr

Registered: 2009-03-22

Posts: 999

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

Because GTK2 should die eventually. But currently GNOME is the only software product using it, so transition will take time, due to shear number of projects, like vim, firefox, xfce, ...

Also, be careful blacklisting gtk3 packages: on a pure xfce4 desktop gtk3 is needed by libunique3, which is in turn required by gnome-disk-utility (gvfs).

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Arch Linux is more than just GNU/Linux -- it's an adventure
pkill -9 systemd

DonVla

Member

From: Bonn, Germany

Registered: 2007-06-07

Posts: 997

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

That's totally ridiculous!
They tried to create a "modern" desktop and applications  look like 1689!
WTF?!

akb825

Member

Registered: 2011-03-27

Posts: 87

Re: [SOLVED] gtk3 living with gtk2

Gnome-look has a GTK 3.0 theme section, which is getting new themes every day. After installing one of those, gtk3 and gtk2 apps look very similar.

Also, for those of you using Xfce4, a recent update fixed the need for setting the theme in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini. Any theme that you set in the xfce4-appearance-settings shows up for gtk3 as well.