Would switching to Qt be a good idea?

[Christian Henz]

"Switching to Qt" would basically mean completely rewriting everything
from scratch as far as I can tell. The time might be better spent
contributing to an existing Qt-based project (LxQt comes to mind).

Personally, I really think it is a big problem that GTK is so
opinionated. As the kind-of-default UI toolkit for the Linux desktop, it
should not be. It should be boring and stable instead. I also strongly
disagree with some of the particular choices they made (such as "buttons
are now at the top of the file picker dialog").

Coming from Gnome 2, I switched to XFCE because I did not like Gnome 3
at all. Now it feels like I am increasingly getting "Gnomed" (pun
intended ;-)) through the backdoor (GTK).

Maybe forking GTK instead would be a thought worth entertaining. Could
that get enough traction among the non-Gnome population of the GTK
ecosystem to be sustainable?

Greetings,
Christian

On 08.07.22 08:53, Olivier Fourdan wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Thu, 7 Jul 2022 at 19:06, samuel ammonius <sfammonius at gmail.com
> <mailto:sfammonius at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I posted a similar question on the XFCE forum, where a moderator
>     told me I should go here. The forum post is here
>     <https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pid=67869#p67869>.
>
>     The reason I was suggesting this is because GTK4 removed menus
>     completely, because they were too "X11-centric". I think this is
>     just an excuse to force people to use their designs, and XFCE's
>     adoption of client-side decoration is proof that it's working. I'm
>     not complaining about CSD in particular, but I'm trying to say that
>     over the years, similar situations will arise and GTK will start to
>     become a larger burden with every version that gets released.
>
>     I know that switching to Qt isn't something little. What I'm asking
>     is, if I can fork all of XFCE's gui and make it use Qt, is it
>     possible at all that it might get merged?
>
>
> This is a theoretical question impossible to answer without anything
> tangible to evaluate.
>
> This is all open source, so eventually, the best ideas win.
>
> If you fork the project, do the work, attract enough developers to
> maintain it, and eventually prove it's better, then it will become a
> de-facto better project. Maintainers are not stubborn gatekeepers, they
> try to do what's best for the project, but they rarely commit to
> accepting code that has not been written yet.
>
>     It won't take as long as it might sound because I've made both GTK
>     and Qt applications and Qt is at least twice as easy to deal with.
>
>
> So if you believe it's a good idea, have the will, time and energy to do
> it, then why not?
>
> IMHO, time would be better invested in a Wayland compositor, but that's
> another huge task.
>
> Cheers
> Olivier
>
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