Zrythm Digital Audio Workstation Abandoning GTK for Qt6

phoronix.com

25 points·jrepinc··6 comments

It's a shame that Gtk doesn't have first class support for other operating systems.

I used to be very optimistic on this, but it's just not a focus for them.

Nobody shows up to do the work. Red Hat funds 1 or 2 people to work full time on GTK, plus a few part time. Igalia funds some part time developers. Similar story for other companies.

These companies are primarily Linux affiliated, so what real incentive is there to put in any work? A community volunteer recently opened a PR to add Android support, and Christian Hergert (Red Hat) worked on the new macOS renderer as part of his job, but we can't rely on inconsistent contributions for alternative platforms. If you like GTK, and use alternative platforms, think about contributing.

Given how hostile GTK+ has become for anything that is not a GNOME application I'm surprised that this hasn't become the norm yet.

Also Qt makes it way easier to port applications to other platforms.

How has GTK become hostile?

It's a long story. Basically it's become more and more GNOME specific, up to a point where it has become increasingly complex to use it outside of GNOME. Also migrating from one version to another is vastly harder than Qt, see how lots of applications and environments are still stuck on GTK+ 2 or 3.

On the other hand, Qt is completely independent from KDE and it's easy to use KDE frameworks in non-KDE apps.

I'm looking for specifics. I use GTK myself.

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