Intel Dev: GTK's Biggest Problem, and What Qt Does Better 282
Freshly Exhumed writes "Phoronix has an article about how Dirk Hohndel of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has stirred the hornet's nest with a talk at Australia's Linux.Conf.Au (MP4 file) about what he views as the biggest problem with the GTK: he finds dealing with upstream GTK/GNOME developers to be tough, with frequent abuse and flame-wars, with accusations from the developers that "you're doing it wrong." Conversely, he found the Qt development community to be quite the opposite: willing to engage and help, with plenty of application developer documentation and fewer communication problems than with their GTK counterparts."
"Intel Dev" in Headline is misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
Dirk stated in his presentation that this is his own, private opinion he is presenting here and not that of his employer Intel.
So the headline is technically correct, but that Dirk works for Intel is not relevant in this context at all.
Not all that surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
Gtk+/GNOME (in popular form) basically exists because of a flamewar, so is it any surprise that the community is still like that?
It always struck me as a bunch of stuck up C developers who outright refused to use C++, on principle alone. So instead, they implemented everything C++ does on top of C, using macros and coding conventions. They later managed to spin their crusade as "actually" being about the licensing issues with Qt at the time. While those licensing arguments may have been valid, to me they always felt like little more than a cover for a C vs C++ fight. However, it made their side of the story a lot easier to sell.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GTK is trash (Score:5, Interesting)
That was because the FSF was spreading FUD about Trolltech. Trolltech was free software friendly and was never going to make Qt non-free.
Qt was free on a free platform (Linux), if you wanted a Windows/Mac license then for a long time you had to pay for that priviledge. They were trying to balance being open source and making money and RMS isn't exactly known for ideological compromise. Eventually they went GPL on all platforms and later LGPL, but it also killed off most of the income Trolltech used to have. That wouldn't have been so bad if Nokia had been their sugar daddy using it as their "Android", but I really wonder if Digia can surivie as being the non-native alternative all around. After all Android uses Dalvik/Javaish, iOS and OS X uses ObjectiveC/XCode, Microsoft uses C#/.NET and Qt is essentially trying to be what Java tried to be on the desktop. And I guess we all know how many Java desktop apps we use, right? Good product, not sure it hits a market.
Re:GTK is trash (Score:4, Interesting)
Until it was LGPLed it was problematic to use it as a system library. It would mean many commercial programs would have to pay Trolltech just to have a GUI which is not something you see in other development platforms. They only did that after they were bought by Nokia AFAIK. They would have little business otherwise.
Re:GTK is trash (Score:5, Interesting)
The license issues were bad enough at one point that the KDE developers themselves started developing their own OSS version of Qt called Harmony [wikipedia.org]. After Trolltech made the license more open Harmony folded.
It was like this a deacde ago, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience with asking for help with GTK was having random people rudely tell me that I should go read the documentation (which, incidentally, I *did* read, and it was woefully incomplete). Qt actually has good documentation, but in the rare instances when I need help, people are always happy to assist. I wouldn't touch GTK again with a ten foot pole.
Re:GTK is trash (Score:3, Interesting)
The GCC digital cinema server, used for playing digital movies in theatres, has a GTK-based front-end for its user input such as setting up playlists, scheduling, managing the content on the server and so on.
I know because I've got one and use it every day.