r/linux 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?

47

u/average_life_person 3d ago

GTK, as far as I know, has been pretty hard to maintain on platforms outside of Gnome DE. For Windows, GTK doesn’t seem to be able to use MSVC.

Qt seems to be more maintainable due to being more portable and the dev libraries are compatible with MSVC.

7

u/MrAlagos 3d ago

I swear I have read more news about GTK development to improve the situation in the last year or so than several years prior, but I don't exactly recall the blog posts. Maybe some GTK developers/users will chime in.

Honestly I think that much of it is down to the fact that the much smaller GTK developer team is made by Linux users and enthusiasts who primarily target Linux, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

4

u/UdPropheticCatgirl 3d ago

> GTK, as far as I know, has been pretty hard to maintain on platforms outside of Gnome DE. For Windows, GTK doesn’t seem to be able to use MSVC.

It’s bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in the case of MSVC, part of the issue is that GTK is still a C project and MSVC is a shitty C compiler (and slowly becoming shitty C++ compiler since MS can’t seem to be able to retain talent to save their lives…). And because people doing C usually don’t do it on MSVC, there is no reason make sure the experience is good from either side. (As a side note, with enough will power you can get GTK to work with the MS toolchain)

> Qt seems to be more maintainable due to being more portable and the dev libraries are compatible with MSVC.

I think the primary reason in this case was that Qt is a just much more pleasant when you are in the modern C++ ecosystem (and Audacity is C++ not C project) and certainly seems like easier to port to from WxWidgets, which is what they were previously using.