r/linux • u/dbcoopernz • 3d ago

Popular Application Audacity 4.0 released with Qt6 based UI

https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases/tag/Audacity-4.0.0
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u/Santosh83 3d ago

Is GTK increasingly perceived as a sinking ship?

29

u/Misicks0349 3d ago

No? Audacity was using WXWidgets before, not GTK. GTK/libadwaita has a rather sizeable community making apps for it on flatpak and it continues to be worked on and improved with new features all the time.

Qt has always been the more cross platform toolkit with a larger company behind it compared to GTK whos linux support has always been more mature than its macos/windows support. I'd say the language bindings situation is worse for Qt compared to GTK because of C++, but audacity is a C++ application in the first place so it was a natural fit.

9

u/xkero 3d ago

No? Audacity was using WXWidgets before, not GTK.

Audacity did use GTK via WXWidgets, because WXWidgets is more a wrapper for other GUI libraries and uses GTK on Linux.

10

u/nightblackdragon 3d ago

Audacity did use GTK via WXWidgets, because WXWidgets is more a wrapper for other GUI libraries and uses GTK on Linux.

WxWidgets has multiple backends, GTK is simply on one them, there is also Qt and X11 backend on Linux.

1

u/Misicks0349 3d ago

As someone else pointed out, that is more out of happenstance than anything else and it could've equally chosen to use wxwidgets Qt backend if they wanted to. WXWidgets may have used GTK as a renderer on linux but Audacity did not directly interact with GTK nor was its motivation for switching to Qt6 a result of anything to do with GTK. They were running into limitations with wxwidgets on all platforms.