Yes availability of technical solutions will dictate what the clients of the software can do here. You can have great connections with the users but if the cor

Yes availability of technical solutions will dictate what the clients of the software can do here. You can have great connections with the users but if the core libraries you use doesn't help you to deliver the features you promised, they will leave for other solutions that actually deliver in shorter time while you struggle with GTK. This is exactly what is going on with GIMP. GTK basically either doesn't support or make it really hard to create certain workflows outside very simple applications with limited things yo click. Also it is a C library with very leaky abstractions including gtkmm. So developing complex applications suck and waste a lot of developer time Qt is C++ on steroids. It adds a bunch of features for GUI development, comes with a great library and many tools for testing, design and internationalization. It is overall nicer and IMO simpler to develop with. So you can go from a simple image viewer to a one with okay editing features and the difficulty doesn't skyrocket. Another aspect is Windows support. GTK 3+ doesn't support Windows. It looks like it does but due to GNOME locking down their overall system design, the integration suffers. The UI looks off due to GNOME's insistence in client side decorated windows. Projects like Krita have lots of Windows and Mac users and Qt is the only low level cross platform UI library that actually delivers.