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Comment by sirwhinesalot | Hacker News Reader

GTK4 removed a bunch of APIs for stupid reasons and GIMPs move to 3 started before 4 even existed. Had 4 at least tried to maintain some degree of compatibility then switching from 3 to 4 near the end would have been feasible. But that's not the case.

If you aren't Gnome, GTK is not for you.

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Might as well port the next version of Gimp to Qt - they seem to be much more reasonable as API providers.

Qt also introduces some messy changes between major versions but they tend to be a lot more reasonable than what GTK does. Since Qt4 at least there's usually some attempt at providing alternatives for each deprecated function or class (the alternatives are shown in the error messages) and sometimes full-on compatibility layers for missing features are provided like with Qt5Compat.

Not sure Gimp devs would be willing to switch to C++ for Qt though.

I feel this. I tried using GTK4 a little while ago and almost immediately switched library when I realised it's simply incapable of doing certain things I needed, usually because either Wayland can't do it or GNOME doesn't need it.

Would you care to actually list those things?

Guess what the "G" in GTK stands for historically

That was before GNOME took over, as it was supposed to be the answer against KDE and original Qt license.

And here we are, having written articles about Gtkmm to The C/C++ Users Journal, I no longer care and run systems from Microsoft/Apple/Google instead.

I think Harmony was the Qt replacement but I don’t think it lasted very long.

That was after Nokia acquisition from Trolltech.

https://blogs.kde.org/2009/01/14/cute-harmony-qt-goes-lgpl/

Development ceased at the end of 2000, when Qt was released under the GPL, removing the perceived need for the Harmony Project to exist. In January 2009 Qt itself was made available under the GNU LGPL, along with the previous license options.

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