Other/future projects • Re: GTK2 revival

From my perspective, GTK2 winds up being "the best" only in the sense that GNOME was dominant on Linux historically because of Red Hat, and thus it was once the biggest foundation a lot of people were building on and thus remembered by many. So it's only best that came out of the GNOME project, not truly better overall. The very fast that it's seen as the best toolkit Linux ever had just speaks to Red Hat's power and the fact that most have never seen anything that wasn't derived from GNOME, other than maybe KDE, and most users can't figure out KDE or find it overwhelming.

GTK became dominant because of licensing issues with Qt/Motif, and object orientation being the new hotness at the time (partly due to the influence of Java on the "anything but Microsoft" scene). GNOME was kept in check because Sun Microsystems also had strong influence on its development, it's only with their collapse that Red Hat effectively gained majority control over freedesktop.org and their focus increasingly became "Linux only". After Sun's collapse, GTK 3 effectively killed GTK's popularity as a cross-platform toolkit in favour of Qt 5.

These days, you'd never pick GTK unless you wanted to make an "app for the GNOME platform". In the past, things were different.