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Comment by foresto | Hacker News Reader

> runs on GNU/Linux distributions, macOS, Windows, *BSD, OpenSolaris, and other UNIX-like systems.

> Each platform’s native UI toolkit is employed to deliver the best experience

> GTK2, GTK3, ALSA and PulseAudio on Unix systems

If the author is here, please understand that there is no "native" UI toolkit for Linux or BSD. These platforms have several widely-used desktop environments, some of which use the Qt toolkit instead of Gtk.

For what it's worth, Qt is an excellent cross-platform toolkit, and does a far better job than Gtk at looking and feeling native across all the major desktop environments and operating systems. You might consider it instead of Gtk for future work.

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> If the author is here, please understand that there is no "native" UI toolkit for Linux or BSD.

You're wrong. When a library is native to some system, it does not mean that it is always shipped with the system. It means that it runs directly, without an interpretation layer in the runtime.

So GTK3 is native to Linux/Xorg. The desktop environment is irrelevant, and may not be based on GTK3.

The phrase "Each platform’s native UI toolkit" suggests that each platform has one specific native toolkit. That misconception is what I was addressing.

To put it in practical context, apps built with Gtk generally stand out like sore thumbs on Qt-based desktops like KDE Plasma, both in the way they look and in the way their widgets respond to input. This rather undermines the app's claim "to deliver the best experience" with its choice of UI toolkit.

But if you like, go ahead and believe that I'm wrong instead of trying to understand.

There are 'hacks' around this, which style one toolkit/widget set from another, in combination with themes/styles for these. Not for any combination by far, but some do exist. I think that started with RedHats Bluecurve. And then got harder with with later GTK3 and their forced (lib)Adwaita-crap and CSD.

By that logic GTK3 would be native to Windows as well.

Consider that for many GTK is also native. Mate/Gnome has been a standard for many years. Personally I'm getting more problems with Qt apps than GTK. Especially: font rendering, once a year or so Qt apps revert to outline fonts (I use bitmap OTB fonts as desktop font - i like pixel perfect quality in small sizes) or worse stop rendering font at all and I get empy menus. Second thing is IME support this also breaks very often on updates. Why Qt neglects such basic things I don't know, but because of the above I cannot call Qt 'excellent'

DeaDBeeF already has both GTK and Qt UI plugin options, so just use the one that’s most native to your desktop (GTK: GNOME/MATE/XFCE/Cinnamon, Qt: KDE/Trinity/LXQt). If those UIs aren’t sufficient for some reason, since they’re plugins they can be forked and tweaked or if one was so inclined, they could write a whole new UI plugin. No need to wait on the author.

And while it’s true that Qt fits into a GTK desktop better than the reverse, I still find myself preferring using apps written with the toolkit that matches the desktop in both cases.

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