GNOME Foundation Announces Cost Cutting Measures Due To Budget Woes

[curfew]

"Gnome app" has become out of place in not just Xfce etc, but KDE Plasma as well. You may call any other DE "hobby" but definitely not for KDE Plasma. The stuck Gnome Adwaita theme is anti-compact UI.

If your personal requirement is that all apps look native on your desktop, then only use native apps. That's the correct solution. It's impossible to make Gnome app not feel shitty on KDE and vice versa, it's always been.

It kind of worked back in the day of Gnome 2 and KDE 3 but only because the whole Linux experience was so fucked up that nobody cared if apps were inconsistent. Nowadays both KDE and Gnome are so very well polished that if the app isn't native, it looks shit. If you wanted a consistent theme on KDE and Gnome even a couple years ago, I think your only option was to install "Adwaita-Qt" or whatever it's called. Libadwaita doesn't change anything in relation to KDE.

Slowly people will grow to realize that it's much better to have non-adaptive apps look like their natural selves on a foreign desktop without themes and shoddy pseudo-interoperative hacks messing it up.

If you don't like Libadwaita, then don't use it in your app. If you don't like an app using Libadwaita, then don't use that app.

Finally: if your desktop environment is so bad that you keep looking at Gnome apps regardless, then why not just use Gnome?

Last time I used KDE was about ten years ago, but I didn't need any non-native apps except Firefox and nowadays also a few Electron apps. Those same exact non-native apps that I need on Gnome as well.

[anda_skoa]

KDE is its own software platform at this point. I'm pretty sure even the KDE people have officially stated it ten years ago already. Qt is just the drawing board but KDE is a whole design studio.

Ah, I see where the misunderstanding is coming from.

The KDE platform is comprised of a lot of building blocks that KDE refers to as frameworks.
These are libraries and runtime services for a wide range of functionalities.

So-called Tier 1 frameworks are just like any other third party Qt library and have no dependency on any other piece of the platform.
I.e. a Qt application can use KArchive the same way it can use QtKeyChain: it simply builds it as part of its own setup and links to it.

At work we're using several of such third party libraries in cross platform applications: KArchive, KSyntaxHighlighting, Sonnet, Solid and, even in projects that don't need any of those, Extra CMake modules (ECM).

I have been programming with Qt for 15 years, and also made my own decision to avoid integrating with KDE and instead shipping a plain Qt app.

What you are probably thinking of are Tier 3 frameworks.
Those are APIs that either require runtime services or are intended for applications that are part of KDE's desktop product Plasma.

A KDE app is an app using KDE libs and integrating with the KDE desktop environment.

A KDE application is one created by KDE even if it is not using any part of the KDE software stack.
For example KDE Connect is a mobile application written in Kotlin running on Android and iOS.

Many applications that use Qt and, potentially, some of the KDE libraries, are packaged for systems that Plasma is not available for, e.g. Windows, macOS and mobile platforms.
Krita, for example, has a large Windows user base.

Qt app doesn't integrate all that well, it's just a happy coincidence that KDE people haven't changed so many things that a plain Qt app can share some of the benefits of the KDE desktop environment even without using all of their tools.

Okay, you're confused because I said "KDE" and not "Plasma". It's the same thing.

No, one is the vendor name and the other is the desktop product name, similar to how for Mozilla Firefox the former is the vendor name and the latter the browser product name.
Or how Windows is the OS product of vendor Microsoft.

Yes, it can occasionally happen that people use the vendor name to refer to the most well know product, e.g. saying "Microsoft" when they mean Windows or saying "Mozilla" when they mean Firefox.

Most people, however, are fully aware that each of these vendors has multiple products and refer to each by their actual name, possibly in combination with the vendor name., e.g. "Microsoft Office"