> If you depend on having a GUI builder then I agree it makes sense to wait for that to be stable before switching to GTK4.

Correction: traditional XML stylesheets were removed with the release of GTK4 so they could introduce a new paradigm, one that was not ready to replace it. I really don't know what to tell you here, because it's such a vast departure that it's going to make the porting process to GTK4 nearly impossible for most people. It's such a braindead, no-holds-barred move that it simply feels disgusting to me. Here we had this perfectly functional feature, and the GNOME devs, being the impractical idealists they are, said "let's get rid of it, offer a replacement and not develop the replacement". Same thing happened with LibAdwaita, GNOME 40 and pretty much everything else they seek to """improve""".

> It's being worked on but progress is slow because of a severe lack of contributors.

Who's fault is that? Is it the aggressive, unfriendly leadership? Or maybe it's the GNOME superstar celebrities, who make completely bonkers changes and expect the rest of the community to follow their lead without question? Maybe it's the lack of directive in their issue trackers, where their lead contributors decide to waffle on major issues instead of taking the directive to just shave the damn yak?

I don't care that they lack contributors. I really don't. That's a grave they've dug for themselves by ostracizing the rest of the community, and it's one they're going to have to deal with for years to come. They had opportunities to build bridges, and they tore them down. They harassed other distribution maintainers when they tried offering help of their own. They've shot themselves in the foot here, plain and simple. GTK2 and 3 weren't remotely this bad or unusable at launch, and it just makes me sad to see people clinging to elitism instead of pragmatism when building an inclusive, accessible desktop. If their ship is sinking, I'm perfectly contented to stay onboard GTK3 and watch as they sink beneath the surface. Several people said this was a bad idea, but it was their hubris that ultimately ruined GTK4. If they need "extra contributors" to fix that, then they should have thought about that before telling everyone else to screw off.

> The GNOME IRC is probably a bad place to ask for help with distro packaging

1. I was in freenode.

2. I wasn't asking about packaging.

My concern was getting my app to look right on every desktop that it ran on, which it most clearly did not. The text was distorted and completely unacceptable for distribution, there were black bars drawn around the window on half the desktops I tried it on, and the look-and-feel was inconsistent across systems. Utterly unbelievable for a toolkit that was trying to pride itself on accessibility.

> the focus is on Flatpak because that's realistically the only distro-agnostic packaging that upstream can support

The issue is that they don't even support that. Flatpak has over 600 open issues of it's own, and implementing it can oftentimes lead to more work, nonfunctional features (like distro-native features in Bottles, for example) and infinite bikeshedding. Every argument I've seen for using Flatpak is bogus. Every one. You can cry "it needs more maintainers!" and I'll probably agree with you, but it's become such a politicized and broken mess that, once again, very few people see the value to contributing to it anymore. Mark my words (and you're welcome to call me out when I'm inevitably wrong here): Flatpak will never get "finished". It has too many esoteric features, unfixable bugs and ideological missteps to compete with package managers that existed just fine 20 years ago.

That is an issue, not a feature.