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In the beginning (95-ish) Qt was license encumbered, there was serious agitation about KDE becoming popular while using it, leading to the very-open GTK based GNOME desktop competition. It was a big kerfuffle at the time.

See the History of Qt section: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software)

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Also Qt is C++, whereas GTK is basically C.

100% agree, I missed that - at this point in time (and maybe still a bit today?) there was a lot of grift between C and C++ being used for Linux systems things around that time as well (including how big the resulting binaries were, because modems to download!). Thanks for the reminder.

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