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Comment by alfanick | Hacker News Reader

What's native about it? It seems like custom GPU rendered thingy with nothing "native".

Linux GUI frameworks are hot potato, I tried to write "native-feeling" app with taskbar icon lately on Linux (Cinnamon), intuition says GTK3, Internet says GTK4. Cinnamon says write it in JS and plug it in as an applet. Qt seems like the most complete GUI framework, but I don't like KDE (and Qt on mostly GTK based env looks weird). Windows is the same, Microsoft has like 10 different UI frameworks from different epochs. MacOS seems to be the only one with some common UI framework.

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Seems to be "native" as in "not a web-browser/view".

Indeed. I try not to use the word "native" these days as it has such ambiguous meaning. I also have thought for a while that Windows no longer has native UI, only legacy (Win32) and a rotating carousel of mostly-failed attempts. There have been a few HN stories in the last week that bear me out, notably [1]. Mac of course is in better shape, as AppKit and SwiftUI are both viable (and interop well enough).

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47651703

It's a step forward. If someone makes an app which is some Electron/WebView thing and call it "native", my thoughts are immediately rather illegal. Cool, so it's UI framework that doesn't actually make a webpage presented as an app. Truly native for me means: using UI framework that is the gold standard for given OS, UX native for given OS, and using native OS APIs, so my laptop can actually survive 24h on battery. It's truly hilarious that Claude app (and ChatGPT) is just Electron app - argument that writing UI in Electron is cheaper is no longer valid in AI age, but yet they did it. Weird times.

Native in the sense that it renders using the GPU directly (or rather via WebGPU) instead of relying on a webview.

On Linux you're right to say it's basically choosing between gtk and qt.

If it's compiled code, it's native.

Why would you need KDE to use Qt?

And IIRC Qt has a GTK theme nowadays that makes it look not terrible (high praise, I know).

Got a link or more info regarding the theme?

I was thinking of breeze-gtk[0] but that's KDE-specific.

[0]: https://github.com/KDE/breeze-gtk

It’s literally the other way around - “GTK theme that looks like Qt”.

To be extremely pedantic, I never said it was a Qt theme :P

I said that Qt has a GTK theme. It doesn't, but KDE does have a GTK theme.

I never said that. Ofc Qt apps work just fine on any desktop environment you have (or even none), but they still look off if run Qt app on Gnome. Looking off == not native.

I didn't take your message to mean you need Plasma specifically, I interpreted it as you needing some library from KDE.

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