[libreplanet-discuss] Uniform look-and-feel on GNU/Linux

[Fabio Pesari]

One of the accusations made against GNU/Linux is that there is no
established "native" look-and-feel on it - GTK programs look different
from Qt programs, JUCE programs look different from Qt programs, Tk
programs and FLTK programs look different from everything else and so on.

This claim isn't false, it's just that most of us simply don't care
about it and often (unjustly) accuse those people of being superficial.

But as the recent thread about blind users on libreplanet-discuss showed
us, the widget toolkit used for a program can make a huge functional
difference to some people.

wxGtk gave me an idea: what if (optional) GTK3 backends were written for
all other GUI toolkits (Tk, FLTK, JUCE, Qt, Fox, Swt, Swing)?

Why GTK3? Because:

1) It's written in C, so there should be no problem calling it from
   any language
2) It has a consistent (some would say "native") look already used by
   many applications
3) It is popular and stable
4) It works well with the Orca screen reader

This way, all people with GTK3 installed would see the same
look-and-feel for all programs, regardless of the widget toolkit that
those program use (of course, there should way a way to opt out from it,
maybe in a config file).

This would also help many apps suffering from ugly UIs become more
popular. All FLTK and Tk apps, for starters, and there are some very
good ones (Rakarrack and ZynAddSubFX/Yoshimi for FLTK, or PureData, Gitk
and all Tkinter-based programs for Tk, to name some).

This would require a very committed community effort, of course, but I
think the reward would be huge. Any opinions?