On Monday, 22 October 2018 at 04:41:08 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
(Abscissa) wrote:
On 10/21/18 1:13 PM, Russel Winder wrote:
[...]
First of all, minor nitpick: Unless some bombshell news
occurred that I managed to miss, Ubuntu pushes their own Unity,
NOT Gnome. Yes, that's still GTK, but still...accuracy...FWIW.
To be accurate, Ubuntu announced the dropping of Unity back in
April 2017. Current versions of Ubuntu use Gnome.
https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-Dropping-Unity
But more importantly, "prefer" is vague a weasel word in this
situation. The claim is that the distros "prefer" GTK over Qt.
The *reality* is far more simple: The installers for the
distros give you a choice between Gnome, KDE and (on Ubuntu)
Unity, and Gnome/Unity just happen to often be the default.
That's the *only* thing that "prefer" means in this context, so
let's call a spade a spade: It's a common installer default.
That's all.
Furthermore, regardless of what distro you've installed, KDE
can always be installed and used. And (unless things have
changes since last I looked) every single one of the distros
you mention maintain the full set of KDE packages in their
repositories.
So yes, saying that GTK "won" over Qt is hyperbolic nonsense.
Does it have a slight dominance WRT Linux DE's? Yes.
Unfortunately. But that's like claiming a victor between iOS
and Android: BOTH still have significant user-bases. BOTH are
still actively developed with no end even remotely in sight.
BOTH are still relevant and will remain so for the foreseeable
future. So long as they both coexist (and the GNU/Linux
ecosystem actively promotes coexistence of competitors - which
it does), any claim of a victor, or of one competitor "winning"
over another, IS, yes, hyperbolic nonsense.
Plus, as others have said, industry tends to take Qt more
seriously than GTK anyway. So once again, hyperbolic nonsense
to claim GTK "won".
[...]
I believe this is pretty much exactly my own point, too ;) Ie,
regardless of the Win/Mac crowds unfortunate misconceptions,
Linux is about choice, not about one option "winning" over
another. Thus, for one competitor to defeat another in Linux,
the loser would have to either cease to exist, or become
extremely marginalized. Note that "extremely marginalized" is a
far, far stronger notion than "not majority" or "not the
default of the options given by the installer".
[...]
Ditto for Qt. Which again, is a key part of my point.
But that said, out of all the people I've come across who use a
GTK-based DE (ie, Gnome or Unity), very few of them, if any, do
so because they like GTK apps better than Qt apps (Or the
GTK-file chooser over the Qt file-chooser ;)). The vast
majority of the time, it's simply because they *don't object*
to Gnome/Unity and merely go along with it - *not* because they
consider it superior to KDE, nor because they prefer GTK apps
to Qt apps.
Chalk me up as one who prefers Gnome over KDE. I like the clean
UI that gnome provides and the adherence to a common HIG. KDE is
way too fussy and busy for my taste. I also don't agree this is a
minority viewpoint.
Like Russell though I'm glad there is choice and people can use
what they prefer be it Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE, i3 or
whatever.
I would also be white happy to see D support Qt as well just to
have more options.
For that matter, out of those people I've come across who DO
have a significant preference regarding "GTK app" vs "Qt app",
the vast majority of people who actually care are on the "Qt
UI" side. Out of the minority who prefer GTK apps, the majority
are GTK or Gnome developers themselves. (BTW, Note, in ALL of
this, I'm referring to GTK/Qt UI, not GTK/Qt API. Just to
clarify.) On top of that, it's no secret that GNOME 3 triggered
an exodus of GNOME developers, and for very well-known reasons.
But there's no such equivalent for KDE.
I have no doubt there *are* people out there who do consider
GTK/Gnome/Unity superior to KDE/Qt, and Ihave no intention to
claim that they are "wrong". But in my experience, such people
account for a vast *minority* of GTK/Gnome/Unity users.
Not in my experience.
Ultimately, everything points to the same thing: Those who
actually CARE about GTK/Gnome/Unity vs Qt/KDE, typically prefer
Qt/KDE. The rest are just swing votes.
As for the distros choice of "which do we make default?",
that's really no surprise and implies nothing significant: The
tech industry's current runway-fashion wind direction is
clearly "The user should adapt to the software", not the other
way around. Thus fully explains GTK/GNOME/Unity as the
gatekeepers' current suggestions. Just like Win/Mac: "Actual
user opinions: not relevant."
Most distro maintainers want their distro to be as popular as
possible. If KDE was a slam dunk like you imply they should be
jumping over themselves to make it the default yet they do not.
When Ubuntu dropped Unity they had a perfect opportunity to make
KDE (or something else) the default yet they did not.
I think that says volumes about the argument.
