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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

Is GTK native? Isn't it just another library out of many you can utilize? Is it any more native than QT or wxwidgets?

For Windows and Mac OS native is clearly defined by the OS libraries that arenpvoded by the company.

For Linux to look very native you need to define the desktop environment. For stock Debian and Gnome desktop GTK bindings will look native. For OpenSuse with KDE QT will look more native.

Imho, in the context of a GUI library, native would mean it has the native look and feel of the platform and the performance.

This usually means the app is written in exactly the same language/framework/libraries as the built-in, pre-installed core apps.

Nowadays, users don't seem to care all that much though, and will tolerate a lot of crap and bloated apps, as long as it gets the job done.

Especially, shiny UI (which I hear many of my colleagues mix with UX) seems more important than anything for many; performance, latency/snappy-ness, memory use, cpu use, battery consumption etc. I can present a high performance, native, tiny binary product with excellent UX but shite UI and a slow, heavy, battery sucking product with horrible UX but great UI and most will pick the latter.

Now it's much easier to make that bloated shiny product, as you don't have to think about UX, performance, latency, memory leaks etc; you just stomp something together quickly, wrap Electron and ship. People who carefully weigh all the options and spend time making something great, generally don't get paid for their efforts. So why would they?

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