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Comment by avel | Hacker News Reader

Is Qt considered native when you use KDE and not native when you use GNOME? Is Qt 3 considered not native when you use a KDE release that uses Qt 4 under the hood?

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I would say so. Just like GTK is native on GNOME but definitely not on Windows. "native" (to me) really just means whatever the system is designed for.

Then Windows 10 apparently lacks a native GUI toolkit, because it's certainly not "designed for" just one.

A similar thing happened to Android.

> Then Windows 10 apparently lacks a native GUI toolkit, because it's certainly not "designed for" just one.

Windows 10 has several native GUI toolkits. The same thing happened in MacOS, which transitioned from Carbon to Cocoa.

If the widgets are drawn by a toolkit that isn't bundled with the OS, it's a non-native GUI. Of course, this isn't always a bad move.

One could argue Win32 is still the de-facto GUI toolkit in Win10. Things like .NET Windows Forms and (non-WinUI3) UWP are actually rendered with Win32 common controls.

WIN32 isn't de facto it is the canonical API for Windows. It always has been, since like the 1980's.

Indeed, but with some exceptions. .NET SWF shipped with extremely kludgy drawn clones of toolbars and menu bars instead of using the native ones (although the native ones were later exposed) and the result is that those particular controls on SWF apps did not age gracefully (DPI problems, system theme mismatch, scroll acceleration issues, etc). That’s the kind of thing Qt would also face with drawn components skinned to look like the real deal.

Native usually means standard or specific to the particular system. I would say yes to those questions.

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