Browser Development • Re: Linux Pale Moon with Qt toolkit

In my mind I still hope that we just slightly misunderstand the concept, and that it's possible for an application built against a raw GTK4 - as you say - to simply "connect" to the GTK4 version on the target machine, embracing the style used to build that particular copy of the GTK4 toolkit for the respective desktop. That would definitely make sense for a smart design.

In practice I don't think this can work, unless your application literally leaves every part of the GUI up to whatever an underlying lib determines the display should be, by only targeting the most abstract of UI definitions. That doesn't work very well for the vast majority of applications. Basically only those designed for and built from the ground up for GTK4 would actually be able to do this, and you'd have to severely limit yourself into what you're going to do in the UI -- think the drab look of UWP "apps" on the desktop with several paradigms enforced by the overly generic design choices that must be made to cater to very high levels of abstraction, including control metrics. The result will almost inevitably be a layout with lots of whitespace "just in case metrics are small on such and such display system", with minimal decorations, and monochrome/vector graphic elements. To drag back up the analogy from the other topic I just posted in: it's Bauhaus all over again.