Gnome has been on this UI course for years. Personally I can't stand it, it breaks a lot of sensible UI conventions and assumes either trackpad or a touchscreen, perhaps they think everyone is on a laptop all the time.

Luckily there are so many alternatives, so I don't see why Gnome being bad is a motivation to drop Linux altogether?

Why not give KDE a go? The KDE Neon distribution is extremely solid (it's the latest Ubuntu LTS with the KDE repository perfectly integrated).

Another solid choice of distro with KDE as the default[1] DE is openSUSE, which I consider the most sensible and well-designed distro out there.

I've heard good things about OpenMandriva as well, which also has KDE as the default DE.

[1] Officially there is no default, but SUSE and its derivatives are traditionally KDE distros.

Because for better or worse, Gtk is considered the GNU/Linux UI toolkit, so it means while one might use KDE, every cross platform framework (with Qt's exception) sees Gtk as the "native" GNU/Linux UI toolkit.

Sadly Qt 5, due to the Qt Company pushing FOSS "freeloaders" on to bleeding edge and unstable versions of Qt 6[0], is becoming less and less viable for non-commercial, cross-platform app development.

Arch Linux now compiles Qt from KDEs fork[1]

The only ray of sunshine here is that, with Qt 5.15 being the last 5.x release, we may eventually see all distros shipping it instead of the horrible version fragmentation you see now (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and CentOS Stream are still on 5.12, Debian 10 is on 5.11, RHEL 7 is on 5.9).

The rift being created between Qt 5 and Qt 6, and the lack of any stability for FOSS with respect to upstream support for Qt 6, means we will likely see lots more fragmentation on the KDE/Qt side in years to come.

Qt 5 will eventually end up like Qt 4, which has been dropped from Archs main repos[2], despite having over 500 packages in AUR depending on it[3].

Of course, depending on a single fork likely won't work either. The KDE fork is going to be naturally Linux focused, and probably won't care to tend to any Windows or macOS that arise.

GTK+ on other platforms sucks, but at least on FOSS platforms it's not a mess.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia...

[1] https://github.com/archlinux/svntogit-packages/blob/packages...

[2] https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2019-A...

[3] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/qt4/

I agree with the decision against freeloaders.

Too many people expect to be paid for their work, while not giving anything to upstream only entitlement of what should be provided as free beer.

For those there is GPL license for Qt.

It's not about money. There are plenty of FOSS non-profit software projects that want to be able to distribute their apps and not have to deal with all this fragmentation.

If you develop a QML app and want it to compile and run properly on all distros out there you need to code use a very low common denominator version of Qt and the associated QML components (versioning for which is only checked at runtime).

Those needs are easily covered by GPL license variant.

And I use GTK applications just fine on my KDE desktop. The DE you use does not dictate which applications you run.

It is a matter of taste, nothing against KDE, or the minority role it currently holds on Gtk dominated landscape.

Not sure if it's really minority.

Have been using desktop Linux for almost 2 decades, My last 2 workplaces have been Linux desktop centric. Helped deploy quite a few Linux workstations.

I don't know many people that use Gnome.

Most use either KDE or some tiling WM (or some custom fork of Gnome2/3 that looks nothing like default gnome).

When Ubuntu dropped unity, some people went to gnome, some stayed but at least in my circles most bounced off.

Red-Hat Linux Enterprise, CentOS and Ubuntu, with default window manager, is what I usually find on the customers I deal with.

On the cloud deployments it doesn't matter as they are accessible via ssh and cloud shells, and X Windows servers can be mapped to single windows.

Sure If you are talking average user.

Most of the people that I know that use Linux desktop are developers, and they generally don't use Gnome.

On servers sure its RedHat or CentOs or Ubuntu/Debian

But desktops are Ubuntu variants, then Fedora. Don't know anyone that uses RH or CenOS desktops.

The situation with Glade is not because of malicious intent, please don't assume bad faith. No GTK developers are happy that Glade has basically been deprecated in GTK4, it was a necessity due to technical reasons. Note that it's only GTK4 that it doesn't work for, Glade is still a reasonable choice for GTK3 applications.

There is a replacement for GTK4 being developed, it turns out starting from scratch for the new builder format is easier than trying to refactor everything in Glade.