[toyg]

> In Linux land, GTK is an especially bad offender.

That's has always been the case, even before mobile was a thing. GTK components have always been padded to the wazoo, and pretty badly too; it's one of the reasons I was very much a "KDE guy" back in the early '00s, QT component just looked and scaled so much better.

If only QT had had a C implementation, GTK would never have reached a tenth of its popularity.

[kitsunesoba]

Much of the excess padding in GTK apps comes from the Adwaita theme more than from the apps or GTK itself. After applying a GTK theme that cuts the padding down to more reasonable levels, I find that GTK apps are actually pretty nice and generally handle whitespace better than their Qt counterparts (which often go the opposite direction, packing controls too tightly or arranging them somewhat haphazardly).

Agree that Qt would be more popular with a C implementation. The myriad language bindings available for GTK have gone a long way in boosting its popularity.

[Narishma]

Can you give an example of such a theme?

[kitsunesoba]

There’s a number of themes that cut down padding (just take a look at the GTK Themes section of gnome-look) but two where it’s more obvious are the Nordic and Mcata themes:

https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/

https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1381832/