When it comes to funding for Gnome vs. KDE I'd it's probably a lot closer between the two than a lot of people realize, especially if you consider that KDE didn

When it comes to funding for Gnome vs. KDE I'd it's probably a lot closer between the two than a lot of people realize, especially if you consider that KDE didn't have to shoulder the development of the GUI toolkit alone (even though it has contributed a lot of code to Qt and provided some maintainers). I don't think Sun's investment at the time was all that big in today's terms. Canonical also hired plenty from the KDE community (I'm sure you're aware Ubuntu Touch was done on Qt, and in terms of staff and expense a much larger project than Ubuntu Desktop; Kubuntu also had Canonical funding and paid devs for a while), as did Trolltech/Qt, as did Nokia, as did SuSE as you mention. There's also always been indirect funding (and hiring) through the consultancy ecosystem, e.g. KDAB's commercial contracts to maintain PIM for a while, and other such engagements, e.g. by the city government of Munich and other municipal and educational deployments large enough to pay contractors. Blue Systems has employed a significant team of core devs for closing in on a decade now, and Valve has engagements with them and others. When it comes to Qt vs. GTK: I would guesstimate that at the peak, GTK+ perhaps had around 10 concurrent paid devs? The peak for Qt was in the 100s, from markets like embedded and automotive that GTK+ hasn't really been able to access (yes, I had all the Maemo devices too). And even for its core focus area, desktop apps, GTK+ hasn't seen a lot of adoption outside the Linux niche, whereas there's a seriously large amount of commercial Windows/Mac software using Qt. This is really what I meant. Bottom line: Most PC users have a few copies of Qt on their computer, and perhaps own a device or two in their home and another in their garage that also has Qt on it. The same cannot be said for GTK+. A computer with GTK+ on it is relatively rare, perhaps in the tens of millions vs. billions. It's also worth noting that users who migrate away from Qt do it to either Flutter (because of more permissive licensing - BSD - or mobile capabilities) or Electron (to share tech with their website) or Unity/Unreal (because of the rendering capabilities), but not to GTK+. Users who migrate away from GTK+ often migrate to Qt (e.g. Wireshark and a couple of others). I can't think of an example of anyone moving to GTK+ from really anything else (probably exists but likely minor). To me that means that while Qt has fierce competition, GTK+ is not really among it.