I always see new GTK apps popup on Flathub. I dont really care and think GTK looks fancy, although CSD suck a bit and they waste space and often functionality.
But they work, are solid, and do what they should.
Qt on the other hand may seem more like a complex job to code with. I dont actually think so, but I heard especially writing rust with GTK is way better than with Qt.
I like KDE a lot, and even though I am excited for Cosmic I think Qt is the better toolkit for many things and a lot of time. But Dolphin seems to suffer from memory safety issues all the time, as well as other projects.
Do you have experience in rust, using GTK or Qt? How do they compare?
I think there’s a pretty big thing here that people are kinda missing and it’s the ease of app creation. Recently gnome has done a lot for app developers to make the experience really good. Workbench, gnome builder, biblioteca all combined with the ease of libadwaita and the gnome circle make app development significantly easier for gtk than qt. There’s a big community now with a lot of inertia. I think workbench has around 100 tutorials now or so. Super low barrier to entry. Also libadwaita is pretty.
I already use gnome now, but even before I had settled on a DE, I took a look at both ecosystems and was heavily leaning towards gtk because of all these factors and against qt because of its reliance on c++. Until all of those factors are replicated well for qt (and by extension kde), I don’t think they’ll see the same level of development.