Browser Development • Re: Linux Pale Moon with Qt toolkit

Though reading the room... I think most Linux users believe the future of anything that's not targeting GNOME specifically is Qt. It seems to be the option they trust most as a successor to GTK3 at the moment

I'm not convinced it is. There has always been this forced choice, you either used GNOME or you used KDE. If your application happened to use the other toolkit than your DE of choice was built on, then you were stuck either not using it or jumping through a ton of hoops having both on your system, making things really heavy. I don't know if that has changed recently, but "switching camps" just doesn't seem viable, because we'd gain one portion of users and lose another. Qt isn't a "successor", but rather a competitive sibling.

It might be worth putting more work into our GTK3 version and making that as good as it can be. It technically is not in the past, not yet

That's not the thing I read from various things on-line. Even in this thread it's clear that GTK3 is "in maintenance mode" basically meaning it's deprecated for use, and people "should migrate to gtk4" because the GNOME devs have made that choice. If they aren't supporting it, then who is? Nobody. So then that makes GTK3 a dead end as well. Wayland is just too big of a change to reasonably support for us. It fundamentally changes how we're supposed to talk to the ISO layer below us, and I just don't see that happening without having at least some foundation to build on. It ultimately becomes a game of numbers: how much time and effort can we reasonably spend on this? 5% of users being on Linux, split into multiple factions that each want us to focus on a different toolkit... low single-digit percentages of our user base. Hate to break it to you, but that just isn't a sane distribution of resources, no matter how loud any particular 1-2% of the user base is. So, what I see is: if we want to support Qt, then we need someone willing to dedicate themselves to that toolkit and become the official maintainer -- no different than we already have for MacOS (that didn't get off the ground in a serious way until dbsoft stepped in as dedicated maintainer). Every toolkit implementation will have to be maintained by someone really invested in it and daily driving it, who is willing to make this a long term thing. Without that, our options are limited to what we already have in our code base, or some completely agnostic solution like Wine or SDL.