Re: How to detect a gtk desktop programmatically

I'd like to disclaim that since I'm not an OpenJDK developer, the upstream
decision may very-well be to attempt to load Gtk when the system is
anything other than Windows or MacOS.  I can't speak on behalf of the
end-strategy of OpenJDK and I do not represent them or their solution to
this problem.

That said, for reasons mentioned above as well as evidence in Gnome's
codebase, Debian's codebase and Java's codebase, I observe a valid use-case
for asking if the desktop environment is Gtk-based.  To deny that suggests
that solutions which check are invalid, or contain no value and I believe
this perspective to be short-sighted as admittingly my sight is as well.

-Tres

- [email protected]


On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 5:03 PM Tres Finocchiaro <[email protected]>
wrote:

> The best you can do is have a mapping of common DEs to their preferred
>> toolkits
>
>
> This would mean each Gtk-based DE will require a patch to OpenJDK, which
> is unsustainable.
>
> There is no such thing as GTK desktop
>
>
> Wikipedia has its own category:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Desktop_environments_based_on_GTK
>
> In regards to Gtk2 versus Gtk3 binding, those issues haven't changed as
> results of this missing variable.  To request an environmental variable
> which exposes this is a reasonable request.  I'm not sure I understand the
> reluctance to provide such information.
>
> - [email protected]
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 4:46 PM <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 2020-04-29 at 15:59 -0400, Tres Finocchiaro via desktop-devel-
>> list wrote:
>> > I'm asking how to detect a Gtk desktop.  An answer that says "always'
>> > isn't really correct.  The use-cases for this -- as indicated by the
>> > Debian search results in the commit that removed this flag -- were in
>> > the hundreds.
>>
>> There is no such thing as GTK desktop. Some desktops like GNOME or
>> Pantheon use GTK 3 a lot, others like KDE or LXQt use predominantly Qt,
>> but that is more of a social custom than technical feature that can be
>> detected.
>>
>> For lot of environments it is not even clear cut as that: Xfce only
>> just recently managed to migrate most of its apps to GTK 3 but some
>> still remain on GTK 2, Deepin has weird mix of GTK, Qt and other
>> things, Enligthenment uses its own EFL… And that is not mentioning the
>> tens of “light” WMs/DMs like Openbox, Sway or XMonad that have no
>> toolkit at all and rely purely on user’s preferences.
>>
>> The best you can do is have a mapping of common DEs to their preferred
>> toolkits but, as Ray mentions, given that you only support GTK and
>> ¿Motif?, all modern Linux DEs (e.g. those that set the
>> `XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP` variable to something) will prefer GTK when
>> available. Though it is good idea to add an environment variable like
>> `JAVA_AWT_TOOLKIT` so that people can switch to Motif if they for some
>> reason do want to use that.
>>
>>

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