GTK – Go To (K)hell?
September 5th 2010 -
Recently, I’ve started wrting small piece of software for my Ubuntu notebook. Since, I don’t like KDE (or, more, I don’t like what they done to KDE in version 4 and up), I use Gnome desktop. As I like my application to integrate with my OS, I decided – “Hey, why not try writing something in Mono and GTK#”.
And this was a mistake.
I know C# quite well, and I can easily created apps in Windows Forms or WPF, so I (foolishly) assumed that creating app using GTK would be very similar. Oh, I was sooooo wrong.
GTK sucks. Creating custom widgets, transparent backgrounds, moving widgets around, and getting their position – everything is hard in GTK. I ended up making custom fields in my widgets just to store position and size information, and I wasted 3 hours finding that there is a simple switch that tells EventBox not to create background window. Everything is so unintuitive.
But, maybe that is just because I’m new to GTK… Maybe. But it shouldn’t be. Even Spring, AWT in Java, and QT work more like WinForms than GTK. So, maybe it’s just GTK’s fault?
Tags: C#, GTK, Mono, Programming, Ubuntu, WinForms