Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 18:31 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
In reply to: Alternatives to GTK? by tuna
Parent article: GNOME Foundation Announces Transition of Executive Director

Well, obviously, Qt is a more than competent alternative to GTK. Everyone knows this. GTK, while not as bad as EFL, is still pretty bad, causing huge issues for applications trying to move from one version to another. Qt has more features, has the same license for the important parts -- LGPL -- and a contract that will make it BSD-licensed if its makers ever break that license. Sure, the current company maintaining it sucks, but having maintained dozens of patches to Qt over many years, I'm not sure I care so much. After all, IBM and the Qt Company, which is the biggest villain?

Over the past thirty years, there have been many developments, but all the criticisms of Qt have been proven irrelevant. Not bindable to other languages? Nah, PyQt has been around long enough that my page about the book on that topic I wrote only exists in an archived version of my website. Corporate shenanigans? Sure, but it's still LGPL.

And as for GIMP's portability to another toolkit, that was proven to be possible in 1999 already: http://www.linux-kongress.org/1998/abstracts.html. (Isn't it awesome how that website has kept its urls stable for over 25 years!)

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 21:38 UTC (Mon) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link] (2 responses)

You like Qt. Good for you. Even if you like Qt that much there is no point dissing the GTK devs. If Qt is so much better everybody will eventually use it and GTK will be another forgotten platform.

That has not happened yet though.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 1:07 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

Like? No, not really. I just dislike GTK more. I'm just like, how can anyone not recognize that there are important applications being developed and used by millions of people that that don't use GTK while there are still people who think GTK, which is basically a motif clone redesigned a couple of times, is the only game in town.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 7:19 UTC (Tue) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]

Nobody that reads LWN thinks that GTK is the only GUI toolkit available.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 15, 2024 23:30 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> causing huge issues for applications trying to move from one version to another

QT has had some major portability-between-versions challenges as well, made much worse by...

> Corporate shenanigans? Sure, but it's still LGPL.

Note that this wasn't always the case! It started out proprietary, and to this day anything other than the bleeding edge still is. [1] Meanwhile, those "corporate shenanigans" are responsible for a lot of otherwise-unnecessary toolkit-induced application churn.

[1] The idea being if you want API stability (and support), you have to pony up for a commercial license.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 1:08 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

"Note!"

How is that relevant today?

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 1:32 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> How is that relevant today?

Very few things are genuinely written from scratch; you nearly always have technical debt (sometimes substantial) from past decisions.

Plus there's the fact that the aforementioned "corporate shenanigans" have included screwing around with the licensing and maintenance promises, combined with a marked decline in quality in recent years. Anectdotally QT6 has been.. quite brittle, with levels of API churn that remind me of current Python practices..

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 5:33 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

I've ported from qt4 to 5 to 6. It's not more than 3h work every few years.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 11:56 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I've ported from qt4 to 5 to 6. It's not more than 3h work every few years.

Much like GTK2->GTK3, porting is made much more complicated if you've created custom elements on top of the toolkit.

Alternatives to GTK?

Posted Jul 16, 2024 9:51 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

> a contract that will make it BSD-licensed if its makers ever break that license

Neat - where is that? Trying to find the canonical source for it, but stuff like "qt gpl bsd" has a lot of noise on search engines.

KDE Free Qt Foundation

Posted Jul 16, 2024 10:33 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

I think you want some of the documents linked at KDE Free Qt Foundation pages. This is where the owners of Qt have promised that the KDE Foundation can take the last Free Edition of Qt as BSD if the Free Edition is ever discontinued or relicensed away from the applicable set of GPL licences (GPLv2-compatible for components previously available under GPLv2-compatible terms, GPLv3 or compatible for the rest, some bits also LGPL).