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by formerly_proven 2008 days ago
> The main cross platform open source offerings are GTK and Qt.

Not really. Gtk UX just isn't an acceptable standard outside Gnome and seems to have approximately ~nil cross-platform share apart from GIMP and perhaps one or two more apps. There are really only two cross-platform toolkits that enable an acceptable level of UX: Qt Widgets and wxWidgets. wx has a smaller and generally more limited selection of widgets and some quibbles (awkward APIs, poor rich text support, docs aren't that great), while Qt Widgets is more on the "does it all" side of things, but that means it's less simple. E.g. a model-backed list is pretty darn simple in wx, but wx is also quite limited. Meanwhile Qt requires you to understand a relatively large model API and more code for basic models, but on the flipside it's also much more powerful. For anti-bloaters, Qt has a larger binary size than wx. wx has a bunch of stuff that only works on one platform or the other and there are a number of behavioral differences as well, since it mostly wraps an underlying toolkit. Qt tends to have largely uniform behavior and features across all platforms.

FWIW all of these (Qt, wxWidgets, Gtk) are LGPL.

1 comments

Yeah good point, I forgot about wxWidgets - wanted to use it but the rust bindings didn't look maintained.