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Comment by alexvoda | Hacker News Reader

Qt apps actually integrate great with plenty of hosts. VLC, Krita, Kate, Kdenlive, etc. work great on Gnome & XFCE & Cinnamon & LXDE & Mate and on Windows and Mac too, and of course on KDE. Maybe not native great but still great (in a world of Electron apps, I no longer expect apps to integrate native great). Gnome apps look bad anywhere other than Gnome. They look bad even on other GTK based DEs like Mate or Cinnamon.

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Really? I don't mind how GNOME apps look on KDE. I agree it doesn't look or feel "native" but I find them to be just as usable as they would be if they were used in GNOME. But in any case Qt is intended as a cross-platform toolkit. GTK is not really intended to be that, it is its own thing.

Edit: Actually part of the problem might be your theme. In XFCE/KDE/etc you probably want to disable the theming for GNOME apps and just use Adwaita, in my experience GTK themes have never really worked well with GNOME apps for various technical reasons. However I think in the coming years libadwaita will improve the situation.

GTK used to be intended as a cross platform toolkit.

Or at least before it became the Gnome ToolKit and it was still the Gimp ToolKit. /s

I've never heard that, I don't think GTK has ever been intended as that. It has been intended to be portable to other platforms, but even when it was only GIMP using it, it was intended as a Linux/Unix first type thing.

I agree, though it's worth noting that GTK apps (particularly GTK2/3+, not necessarily GTK4/libadwaita) tend to behave and look pretty normal on any desktop that enforces a native-looking stylesheet. GNOME apps, however, do tend to look quite alien, even on their own desktop many times. Not quite sure what the disconnect is there.

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