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GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux

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  GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-04-12 00:32 +0000
    Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux anthk <anthk@disroot.org> - 2026-04-12 00:35 +0000
      Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-04-12 02:55 +0000
        Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux Marc Haber <mh+usenetspam1118@zugschl.us> - 2026-04-12 09:24 +0200
          Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-04-12 18:10 +0000
            Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux Marc Haber <mh+usenetspam1118@zugschl.us> - 2026-04-13 13:01 +0200
    Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2026-04-12 01:12 +0000
      Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-04-12 08:08 +0000
      Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2026-04-12 11:23 +0100
        Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-04-12 18:14 +0000
          Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2026-04-13 14:03 +0100
      Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> - 2026-04-12 07:42 -0400
    Re: GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux Borax Man <boraxman@geidiprime.invalid> - 2026-04-12 13:08 +0000

#85696 — GTK vs Qt: The Two Souls of Linux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPdIBLk__tY

So, I started out looking for tab for 'The Fields of Athenry', fell into 
the internet rabbit hole, and wound up here. I found it to be interesting.

It echoes my personal experience. 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. However Qt wasn't an option for 
commercial software. It wasn't so much the licensing fees as TrollTech's 
requirements were incredibly opaque. We were paying for both developers 
licenses and the sites were paying for runtime licenses for other 
products. but you could get a handle on the costs upfront.

As the years went on the two camps grew further apart, plus the splinters 
in the GNOME world as people decided GTK X or GNOME X sucked and forked 
off the old technology. 

Towards the end he makes a point I've also experienced. I run Konsole on 
Ubuntu and that comes with a certain amount of KDE support. There is also 
the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually involves installing Proton, 
rebooting, and finding you're now using GNOME instead of Cinnamon or 
whatever else you expected.

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#85697

El 12 Apr 2026 00:32:30 GMT, rbowman escribió:

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPdIBLk__tY
> 
> So, I started out looking for tab for 'The Fields of Athenry', fell into
> the internet rabbit hole, and wound up here. I found it to be
> interesting.
> 
> It echoes my personal experience. 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. However Qt wasn't an option
> for commercial software. It wasn't so much the licensing fees as
> TrollTech's requirements were incredibly opaque. We were paying for both
> developers licenses and the sites were paying for runtime licenses for
> other products. but you could get a handle on the costs upfront.
> 
> As the years went on the two camps grew further apart, plus the
> splinters in the GNOME world as people decided GTK X or GNOME X sucked
> and forked off the old technology.
> 
> Towards the end he makes a point I've also experienced. I run Konsole on
> Ubuntu and that comes with a certain amount of KDE support. There is
> also the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually involves installing
> Proton, rebooting, and finding you're now using GNOME instead of
> Cinnamon or whatever else you expected.

This woudn't happen with an inmutable distro, be with Guix or any other 
one.
In order to get another desktop you need to full rebase it, reboot 
and fetch everything else from Guix as an user or via Flatpak.

Your user ($HOME) data will be kept after rebasing, don't worry.

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#85700

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:35:03 -0000 (UTC), anthk wrote:

>> There is also the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually
>> involves installing Proton, rebooting, and finding you're now using
>> GNOME instead of Cinnamon or whatever else you expected.
>
> This woudn't happen with an inmutable distro, be with Guix or any
> other one.

The choice of which GUI environment to use on login is a per-user
choice, not a systemwide one. So I don’t see why immutability would
make a difference to this.

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#85702

Lawrence D´Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:35:03 -0000 (UTC), anthk wrote:
>
>>> There is also the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually
>>> involves installing Proton, rebooting, and finding you're now using
>>> GNOME instead of Cinnamon or whatever else you expected.
>>
>> This woudn't happen with an inmutable distro, be with Guix or any
>> other one.
>
>The choice of which GUI environment to use on login is a per-user
>choice, not a systemwide one.

It is actually a per-login choice. You can choose your DE among all
the installed ones with every new login.

I don't recommend that though. My primary DE is Plasma, while I have a
fallback for lxqt when Plasma is broken (I use Debian unstable, and
Plasma being broken happens about once a year for a day or so). Some
apps behave weird in lxqt; I suspect that their local configuration
which is fine for Plasma doesnt fit lxqt too well.

I guess that is even worse when you switch from Plasma to GNOME and
back.

Greetings
Marc
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marc Haber         |   " Questions are the         | Mailadresse im Header
Rhein-Neckar, DE   |     Beginning of Wisdom "     | 
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 6224 1600402

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#85717

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:24:30 +0200, Marc Haber wrote:

> I don't recommend that though. My primary DE is Plasma, while I have a
> fallback for lxqt when Plasma is broken (I use Debian unstable, and
> Plasma being broken happens about once a year for a day or so). Some
> apps behave weird in lxqt; I suspect that their local configuration
> which is fine for Plasma doesnt fit lxqt too well.

LXQt probably fits better than LXDE :) I use i3 on the Mint Cinnamon 
laptop and sway on the KDE boxes. Mostly I stick with CLI, possibly with 
LibreWolf open for look-ups. I have had lockups if I start mixing and 
matching. I never dug into it but I think the root cause might be i3 
conflicting with Mutter or sway with KWin.

I had one box that started as GNOME. I didn't care for GNOME and added 
KDE. It mostly worked but was fragile. Updates were interesting. 

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#85723

rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>I had one box that started as GNOME. I didn't care for GNOME and added 
>KDE. It mostly worked but was fragile. Updates were interesting. 

Starting over with a new account and a new set of dotfiles and dotdirs
is most likely to fix that. It's not the concurrent installation, it's
usually dotfile contents that doesnt fit the other side.

Greetings
Marc
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marc Haber         |   " Questions are the         | Mailadresse im Header
Rhein-Neckar, DE   |     Beginning of Wisdom "     | 
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 6224 1600402

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#85698

On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> 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++).

-- 
/~\  Charlie Gibbs                  |  Growth for the sake of
\ /  <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid>      |  growth is the ideology
 X   I'm really at ac.dekanfrus     |  of the cancer cell.
/ \  if you read it the right way.  |    -- Edward Abbey

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#85705

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 01:12:17 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

> On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> 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.

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#85711

On 12/04/2026 02:12, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> 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 chose a different route, I program in javascript and CSS and run it 
all under apache/php.

With C backends underneath.

Its justs simpler than faffing around with all the toolkits and widgets


-- 
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to 
rule.
– H. L. Mencken, American journalist, 1880-1956

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#85718

On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:23:10 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

> On 12/04/2026 02:12, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>> On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> 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 chose a different route, I program in javascript and CSS and run it
> all under apache/php.
> 
> With C backends underneath.
> 
> Its justs simpler than faffing around with all the toolkits and widgets

That works. However if you develop a full on Angular app it stops being 
simple. 

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#85724

On 12/04/2026 19:14, rbowman wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:23:10 +0100, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> 
>> On 12/04/2026 02:12, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>> On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> 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 chose a different route, I program in javascript and CSS and run it
>> all under apache/php.
>>
>> With C backends underneath.
>>
>> Its justs simpler than faffing around with all the toolkits and widgets
> 
> That works. However if you develop a full on Angular app it stops being
> simple.
Indeed. Its always the shortest path to the intended end result. That 
path depends on where you want to get...


-- 
The biggest threat to humanity comes from socialism, which has utterly 
diverted our attention away from what really matters to our existential 
survival, to indulging in navel gazing and faux moral investigations 
into what the world ought to be, whilst we fail utterly to deal with 
what it actually is.

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#85712

Charlie Gibbs wrote this screed in ALL-CAPS:

> On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> 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++).

The project I forked (circa 2015) used gtkmm, so I went with that
for a long time.

Then I found a qt fork that someone had written, and forked
that, so my project could be built with either GUI framework.

Although I liked gtkmm better in some ways, qt seemed to me to be
better supported on Windows. So I forked my own fork to be
qt-only.

However, except when necessary to interact with the GUI code, I
avoid stuff like QString and qint in favor of stuff in the std
namespace, converting back-and-forth as necessary. Thus I was
easily able to write a console/daemon version of the project.

-- 
I've been on a diet for two weeks and all I've lost is two weeks.
		-- Totie Fields

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#85713

On 2026-04-12, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPdIBLk__tY
>
> So, I started out looking for tab for 'The Fields of Athenry', fell into 
> the internet rabbit hole, and wound up here. I found it to be interesting.
>
> It echoes my personal experience. 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. However Qt wasn't an option for 
> commercial software. It wasn't so much the licensing fees as TrollTech's 
> requirements were incredibly opaque. We were paying for both developers 
> licenses and the sites were paying for runtime licenses for other 
> products. but you could get a handle on the costs upfront.
>
> As the years went on the two camps grew further apart, plus the splinters 
> in the GNOME world as people decided GTK X or GNOME X sucked and forked 
> off the old technology. 
>
> Towards the end he makes a point I've also experienced. I run Konsole on 
> Ubuntu and that comes with a certain amount of KDE support. There is also 
> the 'I've been gnomed' phenomenon. It usually involves installing Proton, 
> rebooting, and finding you're now using GNOME instead of Cinnamon or 
> whatever else you expected.
>

I've dabbled with both, but only made proper software using Qt, as I can
handle C++ and it just seemed to make more sense, and have a better GUI
designer.  I've got a project now, but using FLTK.

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