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Comment by hysan | Hacker News Reader

I might give this a shot but using GTK4 makes me think this won’t live up to the “native” claim on Linux. It will likely feel out of place on non-GTK DEs with KDE being the big one. And yes, I did read the about page disclaimer about Linux but strongly disagree about calling GTK4 the closest thing. That’s a very GNOME-centric view (e.g., ignores the rest of the Linux ecosystem) and makes me worry that any issues on other DEs will be ignored/deprioritized. It’s possible that I’m wrong and that a sizable population of the closed beta Linux users we’re on KDE, but without knowing, I’m very hesitant and put back by the “native” claim (it feels disingenuous).

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It is almost impressive how much worse a GTK4/Adwaita application is compared to a GTK2 application. I just tried this and it has a fucking hamburger menu in a desktop application. If that ever becomes what is considered "native" on Linux I will abandon it after using it for 25 years.

You are free to take libghostty and create an XApp app runtime for it, or even fork it and do what you want. Just because you don't like something does not make it worse.

Oh, GhostTTY is a great project. I also agree that some flavor of Gnome is the default out of the box on most distros. I'm bemoaning that fact, not the existence of an excellent terminal library and 3 frontends for it that I will never use.

FWIW I just tried on KDE (built from source on NixOS) and had some weird cursor dpi issues and GDK errors. Looks like it is tailored more for GTK-based DEs for now.

all GTK apps have the weird cursor issue on KDE if you're using scaling - I believe it's due to how GTK (and GNOME) handles fractional scaling as compared to QT (and KDE). Install the Bottles Flatpak and you'll see the same issue.

Does "native" exist on Linux, in your opinion? Feels to me like both QT and GTK (and maybe iced if cosmic comes to fruition?) could be considered native (or none of them can, depending on your point of view).

I’d answer this differently depending on when you ask. 10 years ago (random, but long enough number) I would have said an easy yes. Both GTK and QT would have been acceptable toolkits to use as the cross DE issues weren’t that many and bugs got fixed. Ask me a few years ago and I’d waver. It wasn’t clear how ecosystem friendly GTK4 would be, so I might have optimistically replied the same. But caveat it with a “maybe support both X11 and Wayland.” But ask me now and I’d say to earn the label *Linux native*, you would have to support a lot. GTK4 has proven to not play well with other DEs. The jump to Wayland has caused a fairly significant split in DEs (this year has greatly closed the gap with many showing great progress in supporting Wayland) which means some apps may not work on your DE of choice. And overall, I’d be hesitant to claim that any app is truly *Linux native* because installing an app no longer guarantees that it’ll just work and look and feel right. You’d need to have builds GTK4 & QT, and make sure that they work in both X11 and Wayland for the next few years. When I look for apps nowadays, I tend to append my DE and/or distribution to my search. I currently think it’s more truthful (on Linux) to say that an app is native to a DE instead of to Linux.

Note: I don’t think GTK4 is bad. One of the best parts of the Linux ecosystem is that we have a lot of great DEs that have gradually differentiated themselves by UX. GTK4 not playing well with others is in part due to how different GNOME’s UX is. The toolkit is meant to serve one DE paradigm now and that’s led to higher quality on that DE. The drawback to that diversification is that there is no easy way to support all DEs. Your toolkit drives what you support (unless you go out of your way to fix things that GTK4 isn’t fixing - which is why I put that bit about seeing how KDE issues would be addressed). The word “Linux”, now more than ever before, describes an ecosystem (or kernel) rather than an operating system.

> You’d need to have builds GTK4 & QT

Isn’t this just a long about way of saying “no”? Very few frameworks let you flip a switch and build against Qt OR Gtk.

The whole point of marketing an app as being native to an operating system is to appeal to users by saying that you are explicitly not using a framework that lets you flip a switch. That you are going out of your way to make separate builds in the operating system’s native framework so that it looks, feels, and performs as best as possible. That’s very clear in the messaging of how and why the macOS version was built. If you are going to go out of your way to market being native as your differentiating factor, I think that yes, you have to make separate builds of GTK and QT (and in the future, libcosmic if it gets a large percentage of users) in order to be able to genuinely market yourself as Linux native. So it is possible. It’s just not as easy as picking one framework and hand waving away the rest of a substantial portion of the userbase.

I’ll repeat that that is what I find disingenuous with the marketing and about page explanation. I have no problem debating whether or not QT-based desktops are a consequential portion of all Linux users. But if you agree that those users account for a sizable percentage of Linux users, then I think my take is a fair one.

GTK-based desktop environments: GNOME, Pantheon, MATE, Xfce, Cinnamon

Qt-based desktop environments: KDE, LXQt

Iced-based desktop environments: COSMIC

By going GTK, you support 5 desktop environments. If you really don't like GTK, just build a Qt app runtime with libghostty. Lots of people want a Qt version.

Looks really out of place for me on KDE, big fat gnome title bar and buttons etc...

Gnome is becoming the de-facto Linux DE. It's standard on Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Suse and Debian.

KDE is standard on what, Steam deck? Every enterprise-y distro ditched it some time ago...

Hasn’t Suse been KDE by default since… as long as I can remember? Debian defaults to GNOME but it lets you pick the DE in the installer IIRC (haven’t installed Debian in a long time since I just use it for servers). Last I heard, Fedora is making KDE an official supported DE. You’re also leaving out other popular user-centric distros like Mint which don’t use either DE (toolkit it GTK but the UX paradigms makes it so just about any toolkit means that it’ll look & feel right on Cinnamon).

Suse has had Gnome as the only supported DE for 5ish years now. They don't even support KDE at all. Talking Suse as in the commercial distros. OpenSuse has choice of DEs like most.

Gotcha. So you really meant enterprise only. Not a tongue in cheek answer (which I thought was a way of just grouping all suse-related distros). To me, that’s not the context for a user oriented product. Any reasonable person looking at a developer tool and listening to that pitch isn’t thinking pure enterprise. So I think that’s not a good interpretation of what I find disagreeable with calling a GTK4-only app “Linux native.”

Also, I thought opensuse (or whatever new name they’re using) was KDE default but with a choice (like Debian)? At least that’s what DE I got last time distro hopped to it. Which is why I don’t consider either as an example of why GNOME would be the “de-facto standard.”

It means what people actually develop, support and use in the real world. KDE has no real support. Suse, Red Hat/IBM and Canonical all develop and support Gnome which is largely what has made it so polished.

Also, I'd wager Gnome is absolutely used by 90% or more of Linux users.

> Also, I thought opensuse (or whatever new name they’re using) was KDE default but with a choice (like Debian)? At least that’s what DE I got last time distro hopped to it.

Depends "which" openSuse. OpenSuse Leap is going away since Suse (the corporation) is doing away with non-immutable distros. Whether it keeps KDE remains to be seen as MicroOS has lots of issues with KDE. Tumbleweed has KDE as the first choice still, but it's basically hobbyist-only from this point since there's no equivalent Suse distro. Aeon is Gnome-only.

For Fedora, at least, there's been a recent proposal to upgrade KDE to the same status as Gnome.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-KDE-Desktop-Promoted

KDE is standard in my house

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