The Biggest Problem With GTK & What Qt Does Good

[billybob]

Initially I was skeptical about the whole Qml/Javascript stuff, but having used it for while I think it's totally the future. For those people saying that you can't write large/complex programs using Qml then take a look at Pixeluvo

- it's a cross platform image editor with the interface done entirely with Qt/Qml. It's definitely not a trivial interface either, doing something like that using Gtk, or even tradition QWidgets would be virtually impossible.
Oh, and QtCreator is awesome. Only thing that comes close is VS + Visual Assist.

[smitty3268]

On topic: what I was actually waiting for him to criticize was how GNOME folks tend to integrate things in GTK that are relevant to GNOME, but completely useless anywhere else (eg. the slider switch).

Actually, at the very end of the talk, he says in his view it seems like most of the GTK devs seem to see themselves as GNOME developers, and everything they do is for GNOME, and any 3rd party apps are viewed as on their own. While Qt seems much more focused on the 3rd party apps due to it's history at Trolltech and the fact that KDE is built off of Qt is the side project, while those 3rd party apps are what they really focus on.

The other thing i noticed he seemed to emphasize a lot was the mac/windows support. That seemed like it was one of the primary reasons for the switch. Only 15% of their users are on linux, so giving a 1st class impression on other platforms was important for his project, and while he got the GTK version working elsewhere, he was constantly running into weird bugs. While Qt views those other platforms as 1st class citizens and he's had better luck there.


Also, for people complaining about javascript - his project does not use QML. Though he stuck it in as something he wanted to look into for the future, to get it running on tablets and phones, but that there was a lot of work to do before that could happen.

[newwen]

Too bad that Gtk/Gnome devs are such morons, as GTK apps look now much prettier than Qt or KDE apps in my humble opinion.

[Nille_kungen]

Too bad that Gtk/Gnome devs are such morons, as GTK apps look now much prettier than Qt or KDE apps in my humble opinion.

In an GTK based DE yes GTK does look better then Qt, but in an non GTK based DE and cross plattform Qt looks a lot better than GTK.
But i still think Qt looks better in an GTK based environment than GTK does in an Qt based or other plattforms.
I find most things presented in the video to be valid.

[ua=42]

Yeah. I personally think the biggest weakness is that GTK looks bad on a non-gtk DE(KDE, razor, Windows, Macintosh) while qt will looks native everywhere.

[boudewijnrempt]

http://lwn.net/Articles/562856/ makes clear what GTK+ is for according to the people working on it:

"GTK+ is primarily intended to be used on the GNOME desktop, using X11 as the backend"
"GTK+ is targeting laptops as the device form factor"
"GTK+ must focus on being the toolkit of the GNOME platform first"
"...people ask whether GTK+ is focused on creating "small apps" or "large applications," and his answer is "small apps." In other words, GTK+ widgets are designed to make it easy and fast to write small apps for GNOME: apps like Clocks, rather than GIMP or Inkscape."
"Otte said. His answer historically was that GTK3 is awesome and everyone should port, but he said he has begun to doubt that"

And with that summing up, it's clear that a big, cross-platform app (I was surprised how big it was) like Subsurface shouldn't use GTK.

[curaga]

Yeah. I personally think the biggest weakness is that GTK looks bad on a non-gtk DE(KDE, razor, Windows, Macintosh) while qt will looks native everywhere.

/me is using an Xlib-based WM, and there is no such thing as "native look"

Both look bad with their default themes.

[curaga]

That looks better than the bundled themes, but I wouldn't call it good-looking still. The fonts on the Ubuntu and Mac screenshots look terrible (the win7 screenshot is the only one where they look acceptable), though I admit that's not the theme's fault.

[Cyber Killer]

That looks better than the bundled themes, but I wouldn't call it good-looking still. The fonts on the Ubuntu and Mac screenshots look terrible (the win7 screenshot is the only one where they look acceptable), though I admit that's not the theme's fault.

So that's the thing people complain about fonts on GNU/Linux! That they are antialiased. Personally I like how they look, and think the windows ones are bad. Anyway - you can easily turn off font antialiasing in your desktop look settings and the fonts will look like on windows.

[curaga]

My fonts do look good. I just question why the official bling screenshots are done with bad fonts.