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by bemused 3839 days ago
worked with GTK2/3 and QT 5+ years and got the feeling that GTK has been turning into the GNOME toolkit as well. not very pleasant to work with if you want your application to support the look&feel of different linux-DEs and not suited for cross-platform applications at all

GTK3 is perfect if you want to develop for the GNOME desktop. for anything else it would need way more developers that are not focused on GNOME

1 comments

How is that surprising? The people that do the work get to set the course of the project; the Gnome devs are scratching their own itch.

QT caters to more platforms, because QT _is_ Digia/The QT company's product. For Gnome devs Gnome is the product.

So yeah, I agree with you: GTK3 is great if you do Gnome, QT otherwise. But some people in this thread (not you) seem to blame or resent Gnome developers for doing their jobs, which strikes me as odd, to say the least.

Well I really dont want to critize GNOME developers for working on free software, paid or not. But GTK is still perceived as a more universal toolkit than "just GNOME" and this might be a time-consuming surprise that hits application developers

furthermore it is still advertised like this as well (from gtk.org):

What is GTK+, and how can I use it? GTK+, or the GIMP Toolkit, is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Where can I use it? Everywhere! GTK+ is cross-platform and boasts an easy to use API, speeding up your development time.

from my point of view, this is not exactly true anymore ..

GTK2 was a universal toolkit. Only with GTK3 the developers stated they're absolutely focusing only on a toolkit for GNOME and everyone else can take a hike.
> everyone else can take a hike.

More like: if anybody else wants to make GTK work better with other platforms, they're welcome to do it.

It may have been a universal toolkit, but if the people that made it so disappear, it's unlikely it will continue to be universal in the future; that's just the way it is.