Browser Development • Re: Linux Pale Moon with Qt toolkit

Linux is less an operating system, and more just a divided community of opinionated computer nerds that hate each other and can't agree on how to do anything, but ultimately are either too lazy or too practical to follow though on most of their fork threats

I should frame this, or something

But the main overarching problem I'm seeing here, stepping back from the overall details, is probably best summarized as:

• On the one hand, GIMP and other larger software packages have shown to the entire Linux user base that switching widget toolkit isn't quick or simple. And I have to agree with that; throughout our code base there's a pretty large amount of pretty specialized widget/toolkit code... The name doesn't do it justice, because it's halfway between UI and rendering engine.
• On the other hand, Liam's article clearly highlights that if you want to stay at the development forefront of Linux desktop, even if you use LTS versions, you are apparently expected to upgrade every two years. That would mean for us that this question would come up every time the new versions come out, so every 2 years.

In that light, does it even make sense to choose between GTK4, Qt, etc. or to offer alternatives being developed in parallel? ...when the overall community is not only divided, but in fact deliberately seems to be splintering into shards that by definition are going to be incompatible, diametrically opposed to every other one, requiring as many different approaches/toolkits... for something that 95% of our users don't even use? Or should we stick with what we have, make GTK2 and 3 as good as we can, and for future-proofing do away with attempting to integrate with desktop environments and find a way forward that is widget-agnostic? We might be losing useful features here like drag&drop, snapping, clipboard handling, etc. Or, if all we're doing anyway is trying to provide an integration layer, then why not run on Wine (since win32 isn't going away in the foreseeable future) and do away with native Linux builds? All things that roll around in my head reading this discussion.