Hmm, well, the problem is that GTK3 broke so much stuff. Plus they’ve made it behave in ways that I find 100% objectionable. You might call it “learning to handle change efficiently”. I call it “avoiding really bad design decisions”.
Even now, with GTK 3.22, my installation of geany and bluefish didn’t work so well compared to GTK2 - I thought I’d try using the GTK3 versions, but whenever I tried to open a file all the files were sorted alphabetically regardless of whether it’s really a folder or a file. Sorry, I don’t like folders and files intermixed, and my brief search for how undo this unfortunate change in how files and folders are sorted under GTK3 turned up nothing.
Fortunately with Gentoo I have a flag that I can set, that says “use GTK2 whenever possible”. So I re-enabled that flag.
When QT and KDE switched from 4 to 5, I froze all my QT/KDE apps at version 4 until comments in various forums indicated that version 5 was finally pretty well-behaved. Then I uninstalled all QT/KDE apps, and reinstalled them updating to the QT5 versions all at once I just didn’t feel like suffering through the transition bugs. And now QT5 and KDE apps all work just fine and I’m very grateful to all the people who did the early testing and worked out the bugs.
On the other hand, I have regularly built GIMP and and occasionally built PhotoFlow and RawTherapee from git for years, rebuilding GIMP-2.9 and using it for editing almost every day to help catch bugs since back in 2013. And for years I used first Debian Sid and then OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, dealing with bugs as they came along, doing my part to report bugs and contribute to improving Linux.
That was then and this is now. Personally I have no interest whatsoever in helping the GTK people debug GTK3. I do build and use GIMP 2.99, which is the development version for GIMP 3.0, which will use GTK3 (or maybe GTK4). But unlike with the development version of GIMP-2.10 I use GIMP-2.99 as seldom as possible and only to test changes in the color management code. That GIMP-2.99 GTK3 interface is so painful to look at, so difficult to use, it’s not even funny.
What about this GTK3 bug from 2015? I found a solution, but the solution turned out to have a side-effect that was worse than the bug, and no, I don’t remember why I undid the required code change and went back to dealing with the flash to black:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748498
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=771708
What about those awful disappearing/reappearing animated GTK3 scrollbars, that if you search hard enough you can find a way to disable with GTK3, but that option will be removed from GTK4?
As far as I can tell, the GNOME philosophy for GTK3 and even more so for GTK4 is “users will like or lump it, they shouldn’t have control over the interface”.
GTK devs seem to think that the point of every interface is to entertain the user and also make sure the user doesn’t forget that they just moved the mouse or whatever else they might have just done. Well, this seems to be an up-and-coming approach to interfaces - look at how much Firefox moves around, animates this, animates that - it’s just plain distracting, and increasingly difficult or impossible to disable animation effects.
So no, thank you. I will avoid GTK3 and GTK4 to the extent possible, to the last possible minute. The only reason it’s on my computer at all is because of RawTherapee and for building GIMP-2.99, which is to say, most begrudgingly and I’m tempted to stick all GTK3-requiring programs in a prefix and build them from source just to keep GTK3 off my main system.
I’m contemplating freezing my main workstation computer and just not updating it once GTK3/4 and/or Wayland become unavoidable.
The poll is missing the option to switch all GTK3 software to use either GTK2 or else QT. I’d choose either of these alternatives before I’d choose any of the provided choices in the poll.