Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 14, 2026 19:19 UTC (Wed) by ebee_matteo (guest, #165284)
In reply to: Maybe a hint? by smoogen
Parent article: Debian discusses removing GTK 2 for forky

Qt+ has a large commercial backing, e.g. mobile, automotive, embedded, etc.

These are paying customers that do not want to see backwards incompatibilities unless strictly necessary.

Gtk+ is community led. It has some backing from one big "customer" (IBM), but apart from it, it doesn't have the same constraints.

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Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 14, 2026 21:07 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Gtk+ is community led. It has some backing from one big "customer" (IBM), but apart from it, it doesn't have the same constraints.

In this context, "resources" would be a better word to use than "constraints".

At any point over the past 20 or so years, I'd bet there were about two orders of magnitude of folks being paid to work on Qt than on GTK. Heck, Qt alone probably had more developers than the entire GTK ecosystem (ie GNOME + applications) put together.

(FWIW, I've found Qt quite pleasant to use, and I say that as someone who generally loathes C++)

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 17, 2026 1:21 UTC (Sat) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (13 responses)

It’s GNOME-led, not really community.

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Posted Jan 17, 2026 2:53 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (12 responses)

> It’s GNOME-led, not really community.

So what else do you call "a loose collection of mostly volunteers working together to create something"?

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Posted Jan 17, 2026 13:12 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (11 responses)

"Community led" implies a GTK+ community, doing what's best for GTK.

If it's the Gnome community doing what's best for Gnome (as appears to be the case), then I wouldn't call GTK+ a community-led project.

Don't forget, the G in GTK stands for Gimp, not Gnome, so we already have a project that's had its founders left behind in a hi-jack ...

(Don't get me wrong, that's the way FLOSS works and it's good, but GTK probably isn't even an independent project!)

Cheers,
Wol

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 17, 2026 13:20 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (10 responses)

> "Community led" implies a GTK+ community, doing what's best for GTK.
> If it's the Gnome community doing what's best for Gnome (as appears to be the case), then I wouldn't call GTK+ a community-led project.

So GTK isn't a "community project" because it's being run by... a different community?

Come on.

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 17, 2026 18:47 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

No. It's not "community led" because it's not being led by a team doing what's best for GTK.

It's like saying a village is in charge of its own destiny, because it votes a councillor onto the local Rural District Council.

Simply put, is your own destiny in your own hands. As far as GTK is concerned, it isn't. The people working on it do what's best for Gnome.

Cheers,
Wol

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 17, 2026 19:21 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (8 responses)

Re-reading your comment, I think it's better to say "GTK isn't community-led because there isn't a GTK community".

Cheers,
Wol

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 17, 2026 19:50 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (7 responses)

> Re-reading your comment, I think it's better to say "GTK isn't community-led because there isn't a GTK community".

That's better, but still succumbs to the No True Scotsman fallacy.

What is "the gtk community" if not the folks that actually develop and use it? Should GNOME not take an interest in its upstreams?

GTK,is a "community project" as opposed to a "commercial/corporate project" ala QT. Or a "personal project", for that matter. The fact that GTK development has been being driven mostly by GNOME (which is itself another "community project") doesn't invalidate that basic fact.w\

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 17, 2026 20:33 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

> Should GNOME not take an interest in its upstreams?

IS GTK a Gnome upstream? Or is it just a Gnome component?

It started out as a Gimp component. Then it got taken over as a Gnome component (as evidenced by the fact that Gimp stayed on "legacy" GTK long after GTK had moved on with Gnome). Has it now struck out on its own?

Cheers,
Wol

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Posted Jan 18, 2026 13:24 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

> IS GTK a Gnome upstream? Or is it just a Gnome component?

That's a distinction without a difference, as GTK is indisputably maintained by "its community"

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Posted Jan 18, 2026 19:19 UTC (Sun) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (4 responses)

It very much is NOT maintained by the Gtk+ community, it’s maintained by GNOME, who have hostile-taken-over Gtk+.

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Posted Jan 18, 2026 19:36 UTC (Sun) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> who have hostile-taken-over Gtk+.

I think you mean they've forked it (which is perfectly okay). But yes, they have also hijacked the name, which is less okay ...

Cheers,
Wol

Maybe a hint?

Posted Jan 18, 2026 22:28 UTC (Sun) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (2 responses)

> It very much is NOT maintained by the Gtk+ community, it’s maintained by GNOME, who have hostile-taken-over Gtk+.

Please, provide *any* citation that GTK was subject to a hostile takeover -- ie against the wishes of the folks that were nominally in charge and maintaining it at the time. Even if what you say is true, and GTK was hostile-forked 2.5 decades ago (because that's the timeframe we're talking about here) what effing difference does it make in practical terms, when the alternative is... being effectively (if not actually) unmaintained? (Let's not pretend that GIMP has been swimming in developers all these years)

Because all you're doing is maligning the folks that have been maintaining one of the most commonly used (*nix) UI toolkits, for reasons that appear to be nothing more than "everything GNOME does is automatically doubleplus BAD".

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Posted Jan 18, 2026 22:44 UTC (Sun) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (1 responses)

Lack of active maintenance is neither an indicator of obsolescence nor a reason to do a hostile takeover.

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Posted Jan 19, 2026 0:12 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Again, I repeat myself:

Please, provide *any* citation that GTK was subject to a hostile takeover.