GTK 4.0.1 Released With Many Bug Fixes, Better Media Acceleration

[dekernel]

This is not a trolling attempt: What does Gtk4 have that Qt6 doesn't? The state of Qt6 is surely not ideal, and the combination with the expiring 5.15 is shit, but the modules not yet ported do not seem to have a counterpart in Gtk.

I think a more relevant question is, what is missing from Qt5 versus Gtk4. I realize that most people like the newer versions, but what exactly is missing from Qt5?

[cl333r]

This is not a trolling attempt: What does Gtk4 have that Qt6 doesn't? The state of Qt6 is surely not ideal, and the combination with the expiring 5.15 is shit, but the modules not yet ported do not seem to have a counterpart in Gtk.

Experience in both is needed which barely anyone has, so can't tell.
But it's the overall programming
experience: Gtk never really cared about other platforms than Linux until recently and since it's a Red Hat project it only cares about Linux, whereas Qt cared about windows and mac since forever.
And when you want to do something if you choose Qt it usually does what you want while in Gtk you constantly meet weird decisions and unwanted behavior.
Here's why Linus Torvalds' app moved from Gtk to Qt years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

[DMJC]

If you want easy text/memory handling gtk has sucked in the past. But as an actual guy api it’s clean, and easy to read/learn. It absolutely sucks to use in c++ though.

[kpedersen]

If you don't like Gtk, Qt, Win32 or Cocoa, then perhaps have a look into wxWidgets. It sits ontop of all the mess and lets you get on with your life.
Many of the platform specific widgets that it cannot "wrap", I was never going to use anyway for portability.

The only real issue for me is that it is C++ rather than C which is a tad annoying because (among other things) you have all the newbies moaning about "not latest standard" which you don't seem to have with C.

[Vistaus]

GTK is win, others suck.

Hello, 144Hz.

[Vistaus]

Experience in both is needed which barely anyone has, so can't tell.
But it's the overall programming
experience: Gtk never really cared about other platforms than Linux until recently and since it's a Red Hat project it only cares about Linux, whereas Qt cared about windows and mac since forever.
And when you want to do something if you choose Qt it usually does what you want while in Gtk you constantly meet weird decisions and unwanted behavior.
Here's why Linus Torvalds' app moved from Gtk to Qt years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

Not just Win and Mac: Qt works on Haiku and AmigaOS 4 too, albeit unofficially, but it's still a win. GTK on AmigaOS 4 OTOH requires the X server environment, at which point you're basically emulating Linux and GTK doesn't run on Haiku at all, at least not that I'm aware of.

And on the mobile side of things SailfishOS is powered by Qt, BB10 was powered by Qt and mobile Qt apps run fine on Android as well.

[Vistaus]

If you don't like Gtk, Qt, Win32 or Cocoa, then perhaps have a look into wxWidgets. It sits ontop of all the mess and lets you get on with your life.
Many of the platform specific widgets that it cannot "wrap", I was never going to use anyway for portability.

The only real issue for me is that it is C++ rather than C which is a tad annoying because (among other things) you have all the newbies moaning about "not latest standard" which you don't seem to have with C.

wxWidgets is quite nice. Another option would be to use a toolkit that doesn't have any platform-specific widgets at all, like FOX for example. Although even FOX is C++.

[caligula]

I think a more relevant question is, what is missing from Qt5 versus Gtk4. I realize that most people like the newer versions, but what exactly is missing from Qt5?

Nothing. Qt5 is a great option, with unlimited support and a great future ahead.

[peterdk]

I can imagine flutter becoming more popular in the coming years. For mobile apps it's already quite nice and it's moving to desktop. Since everything is rendered and it doesn't use 3rd party GUI frameworks it's quite flexible. It depends a bit on how much theming it will get. A bit like QT I think, but with a focus on really nice interactive UI with proper animations and effects. We'll see.

[marting]

Now I am just waiting for the Rust GTK crate to get GTK 4 support, and for some way to make GtkBuilder XML files because Glade is old and writes GTK 3 output, GNOME Builder doesn't have any way create GtkBuilder files, and writing your own files is tricky when you don't know the names of the elements and properties and what order to place them in and how to nest them.

I've begun playing with Rust + gtk4 by depending on git in my project. My Cargo.toml contains:

[dependencies]
gtk4 = { git = "https://github.com/gtk-rs/gtk4-rs.git" }