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Why are there so many (rust) GTK apps and so little Qt ones? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I always see new GTK apps popup on Flathub. I dont really care and think GTK looks fancy, although CSD suck a bit and they waste space and often functionality.

But they work, are solid, and do what they should.

Qt on the other hand may seem more like a complex job to code with. I dont actually think so, but I heard especially writing rust with GTK is way better than with Qt.

I like KDE a lot, and even though I am excited for Cosmic I think Qt is the better toolkit for many things and a lot of time. But Dolphin seems to suffer from memory safety issues all the time, as well as other projects.

Do you have experience in rust, using GTK or Qt? How do they compare?

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No specific rust experience with either, but some thoughts on the popularity reasons outside of the language:

I suspect a bit part of this difference in framework popularity may be due to GTK being more attached to gnome and friends, and by extension, Ubuntu (for better or worse, the most used desktop distro for quite a while) Most of the time that'll be mainline Ubuntu which has always been GTK.

So if a developer or company is going to target something, then it may come down to "what is the ideal platform to build on for Ubuntu as our main target? GTK? Cool, that's what we will use." Of course, either framework is just fine, and either framework targets other OSs as well. I don't have any experience with either, but it wouldn't surprise me if the choice of GTK more often is akin to Swift + Apple's toolkits for iphone development being more popular by a large margin than Ionic/Capacitor, React Native, Xamarin, etc, even though the others provide some benefits (and some significant context-dependent downsides, of course)

If i remember correctly, Qt was not fully FOSS for a while, so GTK was much more widely adopted and recommended early on. But that was pre-2005, I think.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I generally don't really think this is the case, there are still plenty of apps from other languages in QT. in fact, for cross platform apps, QT is immensely more popular then GTK is. Rust itself had disproportionately less apps developed in QT then other stuff, (Python for instance). especially when you consider cross platform. and at least for open source anyways. closed source I cant comment on