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?

  • @[email protected]
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    1110 months ago

    a few reasons I think, the QT bindings are split between cxx-qt and qmetaobject-rs . Neither of which are super great IMO, but even if they were, we have UI frame works like slint and egui which are already becoming quite good, slint has a good native look that resembles QT so people wanting that design can use that instead.

    • @Giooschi
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      810 months ago

      slint has a good native look that resembles QT

      It doesn’t just resembles QT, it uses QT as backend.

      • @[email protected]
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        310 months ago

        It’s worth stating that QT is an optional backend and is only used for native styling, even the pure rust, Native styling still looks close to native. QT is fully optional and is not a dep even for linux apps

      • @[email protected]OP
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        10 months ago

        Damn, thanks for the tip! So does it support native KDR Styling and all too?

        Could in theory Apps like Dolphin be entirely rewritten in Rust, using Slint as Frontend, and still be native in KDE?

        • @Giooschi
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          310 months ago

          From their github:

          NOTE: When Qt is installed on the system, the native style uses Qt’s QStyle to achieve native looking widgets.

          I’m not that familiar with KDE’s styling, but if I remember well it should just be a Qt style, so it should work.

          Regarding rewriting Dolphin, I think in theory you could do that, in practice it’s probably pretty challenging given the amount of features Dolphin has.