4 ms·

I can't speak for other platforms, but for GTK it's pretty obvious what is actually a GTK app, and what uses GTK as a wrapper. Sure, it might have the GTK title

by jms55 5y ago

I can't speak for other platforms, but for GTK it's pretty obvious what is actually a GTK app, and what uses GTK as a wrapper. Sure, it might have the GTK titlebar and context menus. But all good GTK apps don't use a titlebar for the app title, they put widgets inside of it. They use libadwaita and get adaptive layouts for smaller app sizes. Reusing native stuff is fine - it provides rendering, text, accessibility, window management, and other hard stuff for you. But it's not equivalent to a native app, because you'll never conform to each platform's UI guidelines without significant work per app.

webmobdev 5y ago
True, that's an issue - maintaining the wrapper library and keeping featuring parity with native UI features is a cumbersome task and many do fall behind in that. I think most wrapper libraries are still on GTK2, and perhaps working on GTK3. That said, wrapper libraries do help you make it much easier to develop for multiple platforms with one core code base. The final work of tweaking and customising for each OS, before distribution, is true even if you build the product with the native OS frameworks. (Some compromises will ofcourse have to be accepted.)