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Comment by blub | Hacker News Reader

Qt is better supported and easier to use compared to GTK. It's also probably the best cross-platform toolkit one can get right now.

Was surprised to hear that even Linus got sick of dealing with GTK and ported Subsurface to Qt, but that's how it is.

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Contrary to what people seem to think, just because GTK+ compiles on Windows and OSX, doesn't mean we are trying to be a cross-platform toolkit. Many GTK+ developers consider GTK+ to be a platform in it's own right, not a portability layer.

I understand this, even though the constant breaking of GTK apps after each update annoys me to no end.

But you might want to discuss updating https://www.gtk.org/ and other sites for that matter. Quoting the first lines of the home page: "GTK+, or the GIMP Toolkit, is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces".

If your platform is X11, Wayland, or Mir :)

And then you go to the Features page, with a box on the right clearly listing "GNU/Linux and Unix / Windows / Mac OS X" as supported plartforms :) With "Native look and feel" in the box just below.

I disagree with the current GTK direction, but it's not my project and I accept that. If the focus of the project has changed, update the website(s) and documentation.

Also the HTTPS stuff pointed out by distances.

Agreed. It seems wildly out of date. I'll track down who has access to the site and see if we can update it during the hackfest in a couple weeks.

Benjamin Otte recently added uxtheme.dll support to the CSS engine and I've already seen a few screenshots of the win32 theme using it to okay effect. I wrote a patch to add OS X cursor support to GDK last year and it was taken, not to mention work by Christian Hergert and others to improve the relatively new GDK/Quartz backend. So I'm pretty sure Windows and OS X are supported platforms :)

Just a side note in case some representative happens to be around, the https link above delivers an invalid certificate.

And no content. I get a web server directory listing, with no entries.

The content only seems to be served via http.

Linus didn't port Subsurface to Qt, other people who were already experienced with Qt did. If you have a look at their talk at linux.conf.au it's pretty obvious that they had no idea what they were doing when they wrote the GTK+ interface. I mean they weren't able to do a proper star rating widget in GTK+ and blame GTK+ for that. But doing that with Qt is just the same amount of work and they didn't even write that themselves, but the one responsible for the Qt port did. So what they are actually complaining about is: There was no one with a basic understanding of GTK+ who wrote the interface for us.

Yes, GTK+ has lots of quirks and I curse it on a regular basis, but so do Qt and all other toolkits I know of. And yes using Qt for Subsurface instead of GTK+ was a good idea, since Windows and OS X ports benefit a lot from that, but if Dirk and Linus were responsible for the Qt interface, it probably would have been just as bad as the GTK+ one.

I'm pretty sure the QT migration occurred after Linus stopped maintaining the project and handed the reins to Dirk Hohndel.

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