[mpyne]

First off, Qt is native for quite a few Linux GUI desktops. So there's no "port" for those.

But even beyond that, the toolkit you're referring to (QtWidgets) is only one part of Qt itself. In fact I rather doubt you'd ever use it for an Android application, preferring instead QtCore plus the declarative U/I handling.

Much of Qt is code you would otherwise be writing /anyways/, only they did it for you, did it right, and even documented it with examples of how to use properly. For instance, event loops, abstract I/O, Unicode string handling, concurrency, atomics primitives, networking support (including integration into aforementioned event loops and abstract I/O), and much more.

As a side effect of coding to a thoughtful, high-level API you happen to make cross-platform development easier, but that's hardly the only reason to use Qt.

Either way the fact that you don't instantly recognize Qt apps when you see them is proof positive, as they are out there in much higher numbers than you seem to realize...

[coldtea]

>First off, Qt is native for quite a few Linux GUI desktops. So there's no "port" for those.

That's because Linux has no "native" GUI. It's a hodgepodge of GUI toolkits.

That said, the de facto standard on Linux desktop has been GTK. It's what the major players, that is the most popular distros, support by default.

So QT is only "native" (in the look & feel sense that we're discussing here, not in the runs directly on the machine sense) if you target some marginal distros. Which kind of defeats the whole argument.

>Much of Qt is code you would otherwise be writing /anyways/

Not if you used Google's native SDK.

>Either way the fact that you don't instantly recognize Qt apps when you see them is proof positive, as they are out there in much higher numbers than you seem to realize...

Huh? Who said you don't recognize them? On the Mac they stick out like a sore thumb.

[mpyne]

> It's what the major players, that is the most popular distros, support by default.

You know in the context of everything that's been going on, I really didn't think the "No True Scotsman" for the night was going to be about GTK+.

Sure, if you slice and dice your definitions enough to "toolkit supported by default if I don't run the headless install of distros which coldtea defines as 'major'" then you might come away with GTK+ as a standard toolkit.

But even that wouldn't exclude Qt as a standard toolkit. It gets picked up by the package manager just the same on all major distros, except possibly for Fedora

Apparently everything else is "Marginal" in your book? I'm sorry you seem to take it so personally that you had to whip out the e-penis and establish the supremacy of your chosen toolkit (and the Google native SDK??), but by all means let me step back and stay quiet so you can flex.

[coldtea]

>Sure, if you slice and dice your definitions enough to "toolkit supported by default if I don't run the headless install of distros which coldtea defines as 'major'" then you might come away with GTK+ as a standard toolkit.

That _I_ "define as major"? You do know that Linux distributions follow a popularity power law distribution, right? With a few, like Ubuntu, RedHat, etc at the top. This has nothing to do with "subjective opinion".

Don't see why you brought up the "headless install" in the play either -- since just before you said about QT being a native GUI toolkit. QT is not native in a "headless install" either, so those are beside the point.

>Apparently everything else is "Marginal" in your book?

My book again? For one, Linux desktop use is marginal in itself, registering as just a 1% blip. Second, of that, there are popular and marginal distributions. If you don't like marginal, I doubt you'd like Wikipedia's term, which is "fringe".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution#Popular_dist...

It was a discussion about GUI toolkits, and you made it into a BS ad hominem attack -- as if usage statistics is something unknown that I pulled out of my ass. In short, your argument is bad, and you should feel bad.

[pbsdp]

> Either way the fact that you don't instantly recognize Qt apps when you see them is proof positive, as they are out there in much higher numbers than you seem to realize...

No, they really aren't.