Browser Development • Re: Linux Pale Moon with Qt toolkit

Somebody please help me understand this correctly: one can either build with plain GTK4 in order for their app to integrate into any and all platforms, or build with GTK4 + a specific platform library in order to target only that specific platform? Did I get this right?

Because after reading all that (and seeing those horribly ugly UI screenshots) I'm more confused than before. However it all seems to me that they indend to take over the very base of UI building for any and all Linux , and leave it to individual distros to provide only the narrow niche of widget tweaking. Kinda how google took over the web standards, or cloudflare for gatekeeping, and I'm sure there would be other examples of forced centralisation.

More than likely they were addressing criticisms that GTK3 was "only suitable for GNOME's needs" made by MATE and Cinnamon, by giving them something more abstract they could build their own stuff on when the time comes for them to rebase what they've built on newer GTK (which they always do when the current version is retired).

Well, really it's not a new idea. Note that we use Win32 on Windows, Cocoa on Mac, and GTK on Linux... but use our own abstract widgets internally that the others are mapped onto, so that we (and XUL extensions) can look native on any platform without changing how our underlying code deals with things in a more abstract sense. GTK4 is basically GNOME's attempt at a similar idea (different architecture, but similar idea) to allow all the forks of GNOME to continue using the underlying GTK toolkit with the "under-the-hood" improvements still being made, but without too much GNOME-specific stuff layered on top that wouldn't work in classic-style environments. I did double-check, and can confirm "raw" GTK4 applications do not look native on GNOME or anything else, they look neutral and unstyled like a blank canvas, just like in those screenshots.

The biggest downside is it means anyone targeting GTK4 would likely have to target a specific desktop that uses it, since they'll likely be using libadwaita (GNOME), libgranite (ElementaryOS), libclassic (probably future MATE/Cinnamon), and whichever one you compile against... that's what your application looks like. If I'm understanding correctly? Of course, this is existing alongside Qt and all the other stuff. If anything, this actually seems like they were afraid of those desktops forking GTK3 if they made GTK4 too GNOME-centric, and were hoping to offer them something that will keep them in the loop while continuing to go their own way design-wise, though it remains to be seen if this strategy will work.