this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I also use Qt professionally, and it is indeed an excellent GUI library. I have absolutely no complaints with how well it is designed and how easy it is to use, and I am consistently amazed by how beautiful the results are, especially with desktop environments like KDE Plasma.
My complaint, which is really a deal-breaker for me, is that Qt effectively forces you into using C++ and Python and/or QML+Quick. For the non-professional software I develop, I want my apps to be scriptable by end users, and I do NOT want to force them to choose between only Python or Quick as their scripting language. For building scriptable, truly cross-platform GUI apps, Gtk is the only game in town.
Gtk is much harder to use only if you are coding in C, because it depends so heavily on the C preprocessor to hack together the infrastructure that C++ has built-in. But because it is so easy to bind scripting languages to Gtk, you only need to program a few very core features in C, the rest you can program in any scripting language of your choice. This very important feature I think is a worthwhile trade-off for making it harder to code in C, especially if you are able to code the larger portion of your application (which is almost always the case) in a scripting language like Lua or Scheme. (Although I admit, most Gtk scripting is done in Python, just as it is with Qt.)
Perhaps, but I would point out that both Canonical and RedHat (now IBM) are both heavily invested into developing Gnome, and I believe most of the paid Gtk development has been funded by these two companies.>