Browser Development • Re: Linux Pale Moon with Qt toolkit

That is a valid concern. I think gtk3 will outlive us all (I'm almost 50). The thing about gtk3 is that it is stable. You can compile for gtk3 and it will blend in any gtk3 environment. Desktops such as Cinnamon, XFCE and MATE are a long way from getting ported to gtk4 - if they ever will be.

Yeah, but I have been hearing that XFCE is in the process of transitioning to GTK4, though admittedly I'm not sure about MATE and Cinnamon.

The way I see it desktop Linux is fracturing. On the one hand you have Gnome (Wayland + gtk4) and KDE (soon Wayland only) with users that expect native Wayland applications. On the other hand you have "legacy" (gtk3) desktops and window managers that run on X11.

I mean... I get where you're coming from. There are forks, yes, but mainstream Linux (we're talking more like Fedora and Debian ecosystem, not the more niche stuff) isn't going to be legacy setups, and the question that really matters for us is how long mainstream distros like those that ship KDE or GNOME will support XWayland. The fact that there are forks in existence that will allow "legacy" setups doesn't really help us, because those are usually maintained by individuals or small teams, might help a Linux user or two out of a jam, but aren't really a reflection on how to support "Linux" as a platform in a broad sense, which is the kind of guidance a lot of us who are targeting Linux along with Windows and Mac would prefer. I know I stress about the way Linux is a lot (and I'm sure it can annoy fans of it)... but I feel when we ask those kind of questions about how to support the platform going forward in the next 5 to 10 years that typically have straight answers on Windows or Mac, they often get answered on Linux with discussions about internal distro politics, various developer's ideals, personal opinions, and sometimes even wishful thinking more than sound technical guidance or a concrete plan that can be trusted in a lot of cases.

Nevertheless it is impressive that a Qt6 port exists. But if a Qt application is compiled against Qt 6.10 how will it look in a distro that is using Qt 6.8? Would it still follow your system-wide Qt theme?

Yeah, we'd probably have to be conservative as far as what we targeted if we go that route, because presumably stuff compiled against older Qt 6 would work on newer Qt 6, but not the other way around. I have to admit, following a system-wide theme is not something I really thought about much because I figured most people would be using custom themes with Pale Moon anyway, and that we wouldn't necessarily have inherited the Firefox-era concerns about matching system theme so closely (despite that being a hard mission on Linux) given Pale Moon's design goals. This is sounding like we may actually want to take that more seriously, but I'm really just trying to gather notes here.