How does ignis compare to ags and fabric

Question

I have been looking for a replacement for eww, as (among other issues) not using polling variables there, in many cases is an uphill battle. I stumbled upon ignis, and was wondering how it compared to ags and fabric, the main difference i noticed is that it uses gtk4, rather than gtk3, whcih is nice. Apart from this, considering ignins is younger, it seems to have less builtins.

[linkfrg]

Apart from this, considering ignins is younger

Warning

Current as of December 7, 2024
Some information may be out of date

10 months of development before publishing on github + 5 months after this = 15 months of development

Okay, so...

Compared to fabric:
Advantages:

• More services: 14 in Ignis vs 5 in fabric. Currently Ignis is missing only Bluetooth Service, which is underway in feat: Bluetooth Service #28
• Ignis has the API Reference (idk I didn't find it for fabric, not on the wiki, not docstrings)
• Ignis uses Gtk 4
• In general, more built-ins, just checkout the API Reference
• Looks like fabric relies more on external shell scripts... (using "fabricators")

Disadvantages:

• Lacks X11 support
• Less examples for now :(

Compared to Ags v2 / Astal:
Advantages:

• Probably better Python support (?). Honestly I haven't tried using astal yet
• For now Ignis has better GTK 4 support: astal supports system tray only for gtk3 and has less subclassed widgets for gtk4

Disadvantages:

• Astal has some services that Ignis does not: like river, greetd, powerprofiles, cava, and auth
• Perhaps Astal has better performance in some cases since it is written in Vala + C
• maybe something else, I didn't really read the documentation for astal... just had a quick look

[ArtemChandragupta]

Huge disadvantage of Astal is it's complexity. I am not a programmer, first iteration of AGS was ok for me to maintain, but the second is so much harder. Bundlers? Wrappers? Links to GTK documentation?

Ignis seems to be like AGS 1, which means convenience for people who do not want to read entire GTK documentation to change cursor style.