Qt

Posted Jan 25, 2022 12:41 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
In reply to: Qt by swilmet
Parent article: Streamlining Inkscape for the masses (Libre Arts)

> But I hate ads, also the fact that e.g. Google is primarily financed by ads. I prefer a company that focuses on providing technical solutions, for the benefits of the end users (and the clients/developers).

I share your disdain for ads but what makes Qt successful as a toolkit is the commercialization of it, which does allow for the company to reinvest back into that ecosystem. The flipside of it is that they will occasionally engage in behavior that won't quite match up to what is ideal for the free and open source side of things. The alternatives may not have this particular problem but they come with other baggages. That is evidently the bargain at this point.

Qt

Posted Jan 25, 2022 16:16 UTC (Tue) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link]

It seems to work for Qt, they hire a lot:
https://www.qt.io/careers

So yes, there is no perfect solution. Maybe KDE / free software developers who know well C++ and Qt could have a good chance to be hired, improving the situation (at least technically, most probably not for the licenses and legal matters).

I've developed with GTK during many years (versions 2 and 3), even contributed a little to GTK and GLib. Unfortunately they lack resources/developers, so the core devs decided to break some of the APIs (especially the low-level ones: GDK, the addition of GSK (scene graph), and how to implement widgets, and to leverage the GPU).

Thankfully most GTK-provided widgets still have mostly the same API. But still, I think it's hard to port to new major versions, especially a large codebase of course (and from my experience it's not linear with the project size; so perhaps a good idea is to implement the Adapter design pattern, providing at least internal compatibility layers, or if they are only related to GTK, provide them to the rest of the community to ease the 3 -> 4 transition).

I've heard the GTK drawing is better than the Qt counterpart. And with GTK 4 even more so, probably (but don't know well if it's still the case compared to the new Qt 6).