The (unfortunate, I guess?) consequence is that GTK seems to move, slowly but surely, to a "niche" role. 10-15 years ago it used to be the natural choice for Li

The (unfortunate, I guess?) consequence is that GTK seems to move, slowly but surely, to a "niche" role. 10-15 years ago it used to be the natural choice for Linux GUI development -- people were still reticent about Qt, plus KDE 4 wasn't in a very good shape. Nowadays, it's not so much the FOSS world's favourite toolkit as the toolkit that every newcomer uses because it's the one they're most likely to encounter first (via Ubuntu) and then ditches for Qt (or whatever else) as soon as they have to work with upstream or maintain their program for more than two or three years. The erosion isn't obvious because the largest players -- the likes of Canonical -- can throw enough volunteer (and sometimes money) at this problem and get to keep GTK-based programs working for everyone, not just the (ironically, very narrow) user base that Gnome cares about. But nothing lasts forever in tech. There are still people doing amazing work with it. The folks at System76 with popOS are more or less at the design "forefront" (but they aren't doing that much with it, if we're being realistic), and the folks behind XFCE, Mate and Cinnamon somehow manage to "encapsulate" a toolkit developed by a rather hostile community in desktop environments that are nothing like that. But the writing has been on the wall among older developers for a few years now, and Qt's change of licensing -- if that ever were to happen -- wouldn't be enough to erase it IMHO.