Browser Development • Re: Linux Pale Moon with Qt toolkit

This is good information to hate. But... it almost sounds like you're trying to say, diplomatically, that we should be grateful we have a GTK3 port ready to go, but can't realistically support a new toolkit and will have to accept the legacy bin on Linux because we are a small project and haven't done the groundwork for a newer toolkit, and you think it will take years and isn't worth pursuing, so we should just "let it happen," and these people offering us "deals" to be part of their fork ecosystem do indeed have us over a barrel and right where they want us because it takes big teams and years of planning ahead to support mainstream Linux?

Actually, I was trying to say the opposite - although people talk about fast movement in the GNU/Linux desktop world, things actually tend to move glacially slowly, and there might not be much reason to do anything right now except warn the gtk2 Pale Moon users that their distro may (or may not) soon try to force them to upgrade to gtk3 Pale Moon. And that if Darktable feels they can upgrade to gtk4 in a 3-4 month period (with the help of AI), it doesn't really sound that impossible even if eventually after probably quite a few more years you feel you have to move off of gtk3. I think that's what I was trying to say.

Now I'll read the rest of your post, I just wanted to get that off my chest.

Edit - I agree with most of what you've said here. I would just caution that most of your Pale Moon users are actually not using Fedora with the latest Gnome or Fedora or a RedHat clone with the latest KDE, even if that is where the development dollars seem to be flowing. The numbers appear to line up with most Pale Moon users using Debian/Ubuntu/Mint, and XFCE/Cinnamon/Mate/KDE. Their distros generally do not seem to be intending to move off of gtk3 anytime soon, and tend to not be the distros and users that use the latest versions of the "major" desktop environments. Whatever that's worth.

Also, people very often say, "I'm sick of this, I'm moving to BSD", but almost no one ever actually does it, because they would lose access to their important applications. Take most of those statements with a huge grain of salt. I've seen a lot more people move back to Windows (or back and forth) over the years, than the tiny trickle of people that move to BSD and stay there, which I could probably personally count on one hand.