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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

Gnome happened because KDE, older, was based on Qt which was non free so the GNU project pushed for an actually free desktop. Actually, the GNU project followed two strategies at the same time: it pushed Gnome given Qt was not free, and pushed for Qt to be free [edit: initially by initiating a free replacement for Qt, Harmony] [1]. It succeeded in both. If Qt had been free from the start, maybe we wouldn't have Gnome at all.

I think why GNOME eventually became more widespread than KDE with most major distros adopting it instead of KDE in recent years (at some point RHEL was KDE-based, SUSE always was, we had Mandrake too) is another question.

[1] https://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/stallman-on-qt-the-gpl-...

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Yeah, all that, but I also remember that many would-be developers were at that time not convinced that C++ was the way to go. Gnome hence was decidedly not using C++ (for the better or worse, i.e. C++ is today a nicer, much more acceptable and accepted language than it was in the mid-nineties, but basing the object system on C makes it easier for other languages to interface with).

Do you have something I could read about this? I didn't know about this aspect and I'm interested / curious.

And a big reason for GTK’s continued proliferation (even beyond GNOME) is that GTK is easy to write/generate language bindings for, enabling it to be practically used with many different languages. Qt being restricted to just C++ and/or JS dampens its appeal.

Qt has fully supported Python bindings as well, and there's increasingly capable Rust bindings from the community, too.

Which is great, but GTK still has it solidly bested for language choice.

Which of these languages really mattered though? C? (which I'm inclined to believe)

It’s less about languages “mattering” and more about meeting devs where they are. Projects, especially those of a FOSS nature which are often hobbies, are more likely to happen when a dev can write in their preferred language.

This is part of the meaning of mattering I used. How many GUIs actually appeared and were based on GTK because of the lack of Qt, apart from C?

My issue is that I find the argument plausible and seducing, but do we know this is an actual reason or is it just guessing?

I can’t answer that question definitively, but it’s moot because of you have C compatibility, bindings for anything else are trivial to create.

It's just too bad Gtk devs have been progressively removing keyboard input features from Gtk3 and 4. The idea of Gtk as a generic interface is long dead. These days Gtk really just is whatever GNOME is. Which means things like being able to paste filenames into a file->open dialog (gtkfilechooserwidget.c) have been intentionally broken and left to rot since 2014.

If you want to make an application that uses keyboard input, don't chose Gtk anymore.

Ironic, given that in the dim and distant past (i.e. version 1.2) Gtk's (admittedly butt-ugly) file dialog could be driven very easily from the keyboard, even supported effortless wildcard filtering and shell-style tab completion.

Having entered the Linux GUI space only recently, I don't think GTK has that much of an advantage these days. Qt has excellent language bindings for just about every language (even Rust, despite the apparent incompatibilities when it comes to memory management). QtQuick and QML are easy to work with and can easily be designed using the visual designer tools in Qt Creator.

There are licensing issues with using Qt, though. I'm fine with most of my stuff being licensed GPL but if you want to have any other license on your project, you'll probably have to use something like GTK.

> I'm fine with most of my stuff being licensed GPL but if you want to have any other license on your project, you'll probably have to use something like GTK.

What's wrong with using Qt with LGPL? You can't link your app statically, and you have to publish changes that you make to Qt's source code, if you do, but that's mostly it. That's what I'm using for my app[1].

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

Modern Qt is a mix of GPL/paid and LGPL code. The LGPL part is fine, of course, that's the same license GTK uses.

> Qt being restricted to just C++ and/or JS dampens its appeal.

Have you searched "Qt bindings" before posting this comment? Qt is in no way restricted to C++ and/or JS.

Python bindings for Qt are very popular and work well. Even with C++, JS and Python you end up covering most developers. But those 3 are far from the only languages you can use with Qt.

A quick look at the Qt bindings page shows bindings for other languages like Rust, Java, C#, Go and many more.

Many of the listed bindings are in varying states of repair and likely not used much if at all. The listed Go bindings for Qt for example saw their last commit 4 years ago.

By contrast GTK bindings tend to get maintained and used by devs more frequently because they’re easier to generate and make idiomatic. I see GTK projects written in all sorts of languages but rarely see Qt ones that aren’t C++, JS, or Python.

Besides Python, none of them are officially maintained, and thus are next to useless.

You can quickly verify it, there is very few qt programs written in something other than c++/python. As much as I dislike C, C FFI is universal and thus gtk can actually be used from anything .

KDE was probably continually stymied by "it's nonfree" FUD, but part of the problem must be them blowing their foot off by releasing an alpha quality release as "4.0". (And why did distro packagers switch to it? Because users would see the version number and demand the new thing... It wasn't fair to expect packagers to hold back.)

Before then it seemed like KDE and Gnome were on roughly equal footing, but maybe that was just my perception.

Oh, the memories. I was always excited about new releases at that time and KDE 4 really had me rethinking that. It was so bad.

I really loved KDE 4, but then again, I'd just come from Vista.

First versions of KDE4 were unstable (notably, there were memory leaks I think, and frequent crashes - maybe related to the memory leaks - in plasmoids), but last versions were rock solid (starting from version 4.4 maybe), and it was a very nice desktop environment back then.

(Now, we have Plasma 5, and Plasma 6 in a few days, which are even better :-))

Yeah, KDE 4.0 wasn't bad because of its design philosophies or functionality. Everytime people hear that phrase, they instantly jump to that conclusion for some reason. No, it was resource hungry and crashed a lot (mostly due to aforementioned resource needs).

The later versions of KDE4 didn't change much, they just pared down resource requirements, stabilized things and let the average computer specs catch up to them. Now KDE is considered the more "conservative" DE.

>No, it was resource hungry

Was it really, or was that just a rumor from non-technical "C++ is bloated" Linux crowd?

I used to run KDE in the early 00's, and it run just fine, in very primitive CPUs of the time.

I was a KDE mainliner and switched to GNOME2 because KDE4 was too resource intensive for my machine.

So our anecdotes are contrary to each other's.

I did say "early 00s".

KDE4 was released in 2008.

I think you meant to respond to the sibling comment

KDE4 was latter half of 00's. Oh, the bitter memories of having your CPU and memory getting hogged by the mysterious daemon called Akonadi. Or was it Nepomuk? At that time, many waved away concerns that Linux was simply using the unused memory for caching stuff, which is why the resource usage viewer displayed very small free memory amount, so they say. Well, that didn't explain the excessive swap thrashing that was occurring in the background.

Hunted for workarounds only to find out that disabling the above services also disables some essential desktop features, and made me rethink whether the switch from GNOME 3 was worth it. Sure, GNOME 3 had horrible UX, but at least my PC still had resources to do other stuffs then. But I sure missed GNOME 2 at that time.

There were also basically no applications for it when fedora decided to ship it

I wouldn't call it conservative. Compared to Gnome probably. Compared to XFCE not as much.

But it's totally with the resources <3

Totally worth i meant. Oops

Yes but they really made up for it with Plasma, to be fair. They learned from their mistakes.

More recently, there's a trend of devices or newer device-centric distros tending to ship Plasma by default (e.g. Steam Deck/SteamOS, Asahi Linux for Apple Silicon Macs, a bit earlier the PineBook).

KDE is easier to pare down/minimize due to it's classical componentized structure ("KFrameworks").

It's really hard to do the same with gnome-shell, without either forking it or writing a replacement.

Not that the latter is a bad thing, necessarily, gnome wants to provide a cohesive experience. That just doesn't fit in as much for environments trying to go against that vision (Pop_OS!, SteamOS, etc).

There's a timeline mismatch.

I'm speaking about the time when Gnome was created.

KDE 4 happened long after these issues of Qt being non-free (and it's not FUD, Qt was not free, it's a fact). Qt was released under the GPL in 2000, 8 years before KDE 4. At the time of KDE 4, nobody was (even) mentioning the non free Qt issue anymore. It was already old history.

The instability of the first releases of KDE 4 might have played a role in Gnome success, but Gnome was already the dominant desktop. It was Ubuntu's default desktop, and Ubuntu was the major desktop linux distro. I think it was still Gnome 2, with Unity about to be released.

KDE 4 was a big shiny promise and took some time to be released (because it was a huge revamp), that's why we wanted to have it.

> Qt which was non free

It was GPL licenced. If you call that "non-free" that's downright Orwellian.

That's not true. It was first released under the Qt Free Edition License, which was nonfree. Harmony was started in that time. In 1999 version 2 was released under the Q Public License, which was a free software license but not GPL-compatible. Then in 2000 version 2.2 was released under the GPL, and the Harmony endeavor ended.

It's so not relevant. All the Linux desktop wars happened when Qt was already GPL, including Gnome, Gnome 3, KDE 4 and Unity.

It was already GPL for almost a decade when the described events happened.

Again, I was speaking about Gnome's creation, which was first released in 1999, before Qt was freed, and started in 1997, 3 years before this and a few months after KDE's first release.

It's relevant to the reasons for the creation Gnome. Gnome was very specifically created before that and the whole ruckus over that was if anything one of the big drivers behind the GPL release of Qt.

The flamewars over this at the time were epic. Had Qt already been GPL'd, the chances of Gnome taking off would have been far smaller - though there were other differences as well, the GPL issue was by far the most prominent.

Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are "modern history" compared to the events we describe. Back then (way before those release) KDE was less free than Gnome.

> It was GPL licenced

It wasn't. That was the point here. You do not know your hoitory well enough to comment.

Qt didn't start out as GPL. It's even in the article.

(A)GPL happens to be my favorite license, but even if I meant what you said, calling this Orwellian would be a bit much, if not outright off-topic, don't you think?

I'm all for using the definitions correctly, but people can make mistakes and deserve to be answered gently.

I remember GNOME fan base carrying this "freedom is slavery" narrative way into 2010s.

What do you mean? Do you have pointers? What freedom are you speaking about? Doesn't ring a bell.

The only related thing I can think of is the argument that permissive free software license lets people build proprietary software on top of the licensed work, but the argument is not surprising and it's still true. I also don't remember slavery being mentioned. That would be a bit much. Now I can't manage to link this matter of fact with the discussion, KDE and GNOME both being GPL software.

"Linux is only free if your time is worthless."

How is that relevant to the current discussion?

Besides, I hate this sentence. It is very wrong, or true for any OS, whichever you prefer, and I'm seeing it more and more often. This kind of falsehoods doesn't need to be spread like this. Linux just doesn't get in my way and it has just worked for how I've been using my computer for years. To the contrary, the desktop environment and tools it lets me use are very efficient for me.

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