All the news about GTK were about big projects dumping it in favor of Qt or other, did anything changed significantly? I only seen it used cross platform for extremely basic GUIs for Python apps. It also looked like shit==GNOME on Mac and Windows.
Well new GTK is claiming that they're making it easier to write non-gnome GTK apps. What that looks like to me is that a lot of functionality is moving into a gnome-specific library (libadwaita) and you'll need to find another provider for those gnome specific widgets and functions and stuff. Pop OS makes another add-on library like that.
Meanwhile QT continues to work great and they've largely solved the licensing issues that were a problem in the past. It's also a comparatively stable project and supports targets like android, iOS, rendering directly on to buffers (you can embed it into games). If you're starting a new project I think QT should be your default unless you have a good reason to use GTK.
I'm not qualified to assess the code quality of either project, but I have been impressed by QT for the few things I've needed to build a gui for. Things just work but if you need really specific functionality (like rendering directly to a framebuffer with no display server on embedded linux) it's not too hard to make it work. I'm honestly a bit mystified as to why anyone would choose GTK for a new project, unless they were specifically targeting the Gnome desktop and only the Gnome desktop.
> a lot of functionality is moving into a gnome-specific library (libadwaita)
Sort of?
Mostly just design patterns that are explicit to GNOME. And that is primarily a response to people being (rightfully or not) unhappy that too much GNOME was ending up in GTK itself.
True, I seen also a lot of Qt usage in proprietary Desktop apps and I was surprised. In my work Deskop apps are no longer popular, everything is a website now, SPA.
Qt also supports GPU rendering. Ultimately Qt is based around a software rasterizer that can also be implemented using hardware primitives. It handles the abstraction better than any other framework I've used.
GTK 4 allows widget to snapshot into a render-tree, which has OpenGL, Vulkan, and Cairo for software fallback rendering. It also provides diff'ing for minimal damage and all the other important bits.
I was thinking at Wireshark, LXDE and a very popular Youtube Video where Linux Torvalds explains that GTK is so bad that the GUI app he was creating for diving switched to Qt because even his RedHat friends were unable to help him to do some ncie things in GTK. I never seen some cross platform app switching from Qt to GTK because GTK is better.
