4 ms·

Which is great, but GTK still has it solidly bested for language choice.

by jwells89 3y ago

jraph 3y ago
Which of these languages really mattered though? C? (which I'm inclined to believe)
- jwells89 3y ago
  It’s less about languages “mattering” and more about meeting devs where they are. Projects, especially those of a FOSS nature which are often hobbies, are more likely to happen when a dev can write in their preferred language.
  - jraph 3y ago
    This is part of the meaning of mattering I used. How many GUIs actually appeared and were based on GTK because of the lack of Qt, apart from C? My issue is that I find the argument plausible and seducing, but do we know this is an actual reason or is it just guessing?
    - jwells89 3y ago
      I can’t answer that question definitively, but it’s moot because of you have C compatibility, bindings for anything else are trivial to create.
superkuh 3y ago
It's just too bad Gtk devs have been progressively removing keyboard input features from Gtk3 and 4. The idea of Gtk as a generic interface is long dead. These days Gtk really just is whatever GNOME is. Which means things like being able to paste filenames into a file->open dialog (gtkfilechooserwidget.c) have been intentionally broken and left to rot since 2014. If you want to make an application that uses keyboard input, don't chose Gtk anymore.
- robinsonb5 3y ago
  Ironic, given that in the dim and distant past (i.e. version 1.2) Gtk's (admittedly butt-ugly) file dialog could be driven very easily from the keyboard, even supported effortless wildcard filtering and shell-style tab completion.
jeroenhd 3y ago
Having entered the Linux GUI space only recently, I don't think GTK has that much of an advantage these days. Qt has excellent language bindings for just about every language (even Rust, despite the apparent incompatibilities when it comes to memory management). QtQuick and QML are easy to work with and can easily be designed using the visual designer tools in Qt Creator. There are licensing issues with using Qt, though. I'm fine with most of my stuff being licensed GPL but if you want to have any other license on your project, you'll probably have to use something like GTK.
- rubymamis 3y ago
  > I'm fine with most of my stuff being licensed GPL but if you want to have any other license on your project, you'll probably have to use something like GTK. What's wrong with using Qt with LGPL? You can't link your app statically, and you have to publish changes that you make to Qt's source code, if you do, but that's mostly it. That's what I'm using for my app[1]. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/ https://www.get-plume.com/
  - jeroenhd 3y ago
    Modern Qt is a mix of GPL/paid and LGPL code. The LGPL part is fine, of course, that's the same license GTK uses.

Which is great, but GTK still has it solidly bested for language choice.

jraph 3y ago

Which of these languages really mattered though? C? (which I'm inclined to believe)

jwells89 3y ago
It’s less about languages “mattering” and more about meeting devs where they are. Projects, especially those of a FOSS nature which are often hobbies, are more likely to happen when a dev can write in their preferred language.
- jraph 3y ago
  This is part of the meaning of mattering I used. How many GUIs actually appeared and were based on GTK because of the lack of Qt, apart from C? My issue is that I find the argument plausible and seducing, but do we know this is an actual reason or is it just guessing?
  - jwells89 3y ago
    I can’t answer that question definitively, but it’s moot because of you have C compatibility, bindings for anything else are trivial to create.

superkuh 3y ago

It's just too bad Gtk devs have been progressively removing keyboard input features from Gtk3 and 4. The idea of Gtk as a generic interface is long dead. These days Gtk really just is whatever GNOME is. Which means things like being able to paste filenames into a file->open dialog (gtkfilechooserwidget.c) have been intentionally broken and left to rot since 2014. If you want to make an application that uses keyboard input, don't chose Gtk anymore.

robinsonb5 3y ago
Ironic, given that in the dim and distant past (i.e. version 1.2) Gtk's (admittedly butt-ugly) file dialog could be driven very easily from the keyboard, even supported effortless wildcard filtering and shell-style tab completion.

jeroenhd 3y ago

Having entered the Linux GUI space only recently, I don't think GTK has that much of an advantage these days. Qt has excellent language bindings for just about every language (even Rust, despite the apparent incompatibilities when it comes to memory management). QtQuick and QML are easy to work with and can easily be designed using the visual designer tools in Qt Creator. There are licensing issues with using Qt, though. I'm fine with most of my stuff being licensed GPL but if you want to have any other license on your project, you'll probably have to use something like GTK.

rubymamis 3y ago
> I'm fine with most of my stuff being licensed GPL but if you want to have any other license on your project, you'll probably have to use something like GTK. What's wrong with using Qt with LGPL? You can't link your app statically, and you have to publish changes that you make to Qt's source code, if you do, but that's mostly it. That's what I'm using for my app[1]. [1] https://www.get-plume.com/ https://www.get-plume.com/
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Modern Qt is a mix of GPL/paid and LGPL code. The LGPL part is fine, of course, that's the same license GTK uses.