Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: rbowman Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux Date: 12 Apr 2026 08:08:01 GMT Lines: 31 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net JgTYAczAAEBZxiB5glmbWAfmdMl87kzER5qTgU2fnPxMUfg4ZU Cancel-Lock: sha1:myZZrHqcTyYyjFQqr77Zg9Nc23U= sha256:gTujVnwc2U9dfT60Dv1uMo9Nqb6N6zdAy1UiP98EMZU= User-Agent: Pan/0.162 (Pokrosvk) Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:85705 On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 01:12:17 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote: > On 2026-04-12, rbowman wrote: > >> While I am primarily a C programmer and mostly worked with Motif/Tk my >> initial feeling was Gtk was incredibly ugly, and the was a few Gtks >> ago. > > What little GUI puttering I've done in Linux was with GTK. > I too am primarily a C programmer, and GTK was the only package that > worked with straight C (i.e. not requiring C++). I preferred wxWidgets (wxWindows at the time) which is a C++ toolkit that us built on Gtk for Linux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WxWidgets There are a number of bindings including wxPython and wxPerl. The code looks quite a bit like C++ Windows API programming, instead of the C kludge. I'm not allergic to C++ but I avoid a lot of the more esoteric pieces. It's interesting how many DEs have derived from various versions of Gtk, Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, and LXDE for example. The original LXDE crew jumped ship and developed LXQt. I think Lumina is still around and there probably are others but Qt/KDE doesn't seem to have spawned as many forked derivatives. I wonder if that's because of licensing ambiguities or, as he points out in the video, Qt doesn't make a lot of breaking changes that piss people off.