Why do you care so much about the UI framework used?

Or he just prefers GTK. I sure like it better than QT.

No person who has written software with both prefers GTK :D

I can still use and develop GTK2 software in Debian out-of-the-box, but not Qt3 or even Qt4.

Yes, because GTK2 is so difficult to upgrade to new versions, whereas Qt4 to Qt5 usually only involved replacing a few identifiers (cannot speak to Qt6 since I don't do Qt anymore). That's why distros need to drag GTK2 along even though we are already at GTK4.

> so difficult to upgrade to new versions

Perhaps, because GTK developers insist, that GTK2, GTK3, GTK4 are different toolkits.

> Qt4 to Qt5 usually only involved ...

I'd start with Qt3 to Qt4.

Yeah let's start on a specific version that they overhauled the API since computers are getting new hardware features, god forbid a different DPI. And use that as a leverage point against a library that kept their API quite stable for the last 20 years!

Especially when comparing Qt against a library who couldn't keep its shit together for 5 years and is infamous for breaking all sorts of API and removing features.

> since computers are getting new hardware features

It's not possible to move forwards fast anywhere.

> and removing features

Yeah, this is indeed very unfortunate. They claim the GTK core team is about 2 devs, so tiny that we're lucky the development goes further at all. Hard to understand considering Red Hat became part of IBM.

I work on the IUP fork, where I have and support the Qt driver, which works with both Qt5 and Qt6, and I only need a couple of checks to make it work on both. I often check if I broke the Qt5 build; nope, all good there, hard to break. For GTK3 and GTK4, those must be separate drivers; there's no way you can handle that with a couple of checks. Everything is different. That was possible to some extent and works with GTK2/GTK3 (single driver), but there are so many checks and workarounds there. Qt is so nice to work with.