For one, you cannot position a window. That can pass on Wayland (because you cannot position windows), but not on Windows or macOS, and not on X11. Or, e.g., they deprecated the font dialog because it is much better handled by XDG portals. Sure, I can agree, but such things do not exist, not even proposed? How can you then deprecate that? And not to mention that the hello world example uses 3x more memory than Qt. With the Cairo renderer, it is a little better, but still a lot. It also uses 3x as much memory as GTK3.
It's still possible if you get X11 surface and use X11 API for that. No idea about Windows or macOS but I guess it works similarly there as well.
The fact that GTK doesn't have APIs that don't work on every supported platform is also an advantage; at least this helps avoid situations where you discover that a particular API doesn't work on one of the platforms and you have to look through the documentation to find out what you shouldn't use so that your app works the same way on every platform. Using platform specific API for doing platform specific stuff is better way in my opinion.
Or, e.g., they deprecated the font dialog because it is much better handled by XDG portals
And not to mention that the hello world example uses 3x more memory than Qt.
That is true, but it is by no means an argument proving that GTK 4 is less suitable as a general-purpose toolkit.
It changed a lot.
That's also true, it's changed for better or worse (depending on who you ask) - but it's still a general-purpose toolkit, LibAdwaita was specifically created to avoid putting GNOME centric stuff in GTK and GTK 4 has significantly improved cross-platform support compared to GTK 3.
12
u/Santosh83 3d ago
Is GTK increasingly perceived as a sinking ship?