The (unfortunate, I guess?) consequence is that GTK seems to move, slowly but surely, to a "niche" role. 10-15 years ago it used to be the natural choice for Linux GUI development -- people were still reticent about Qt, plus KDE 4 wasn't in a very good shape.

Nowadays, it's not so much the FOSS world's favourite toolkit as the toolkit that every newcomer uses because it's the one they're most likely to encounter first (via Ubuntu) and then ditches for Qt (or whatever else) as soon as they have to work with upstream or maintain their program for more than two or three years. The erosion isn't obvious because the largest players -- the likes of Canonical -- can throw enough volunteer (and sometimes money) at this problem and get to keep GTK-based programs working for everyone, not just the (ironically, very narrow) user base that Gnome cares about. But nothing lasts forever in tech.

There are still people doing amazing work with it. The folks at System76 with popOS are more or less at the design "forefront" (but they aren't doing that much with it, if we're being realistic), and the folks behind XFCE, Mate and Cinnamon somehow manage to "encapsulate" a toolkit developed by a rather hostile community in desktop environments that are nothing like that. But the writing has been on the wall among older developers for a few years now, and Qt's change of licensing -- if that ever were to happen -- wouldn't be enough to erase it IMHO.

XFCE is where I landed and it works well for me. I'm really thankful for the people that work on those efforts.

Then we wonder why Electron has become the platform of choice for multi-platform apps.

There's (part of) the answer.

I don't know if/don't think that Qt's licensing is an issue for most of the people who need to make cross-platform applications and reach out for Electron. Electron seems to be the default choice not just for FOSS projects, but also for commercial projects, which have no qualms using a toolkit that might go proprietary, and can get a commercial license if they need it (which most of them don't).

GTK, on the other hand, yeah, it hasn't been a good choice for cross-platform development for years now. The only platform it properly supports is Gnome.

I definitely started out as a strong gtk advocate. But these days I wouldn't have qualms about using QT if it were the right fit for the project.

I'm not sure I'd be down with it if every application become an Electron one. But the browser does have some significant benefits since the people who make the browser did all the heavy lifting for you.

Chromium started out using gtk2 and then switched to Aura? Do any projects use aura directly?

Yeah...yeah.

Expanding further on this, I can say that times since TOPAZ were all about GTK becoming more, and more of a RedHat toolkit, with all alienation of non-RedHat affiliated maintainers coming from that.

TOPAZ was essentially a "coup" made by 3 RedHat affiliated developers. They worked completely behind closed door, and then came with fait accompli almost overnight, saying that the buggy hell of Gnome Shell, and its hello world level was the GNOME 3.0, and we will be wrapping all 2.0 development.

It always come to a point where they first manage to alienate all worthy maintainers, and then complain that "nobody maintains this crap, and I now do what I want"

Now, how do you go against such takeovers?

Yup. I did extremely minor work on gtk, pygtk, and dynamic bindings, and agree with you regarding the alienation. It was especially hard with the attitudes on the mailing list.

Are you involved in any toolkit stuff these days?

EDIT: hahah i'm getting trashed for my "yeah...yeahh..." comment above. sorry I wasn't clear about my agreement. :D

No, for like 13 years. May have been sending a patch or two a year, but nothing more. Been more active in my teenage years.

Avalonia is showing promise as a cross plattform UI kit and has an active and friendly community. The caveat is that it's based on dotnet core, which is a put off for some Linux users. Linux support is a priority in Avalonia and is not being shelved like previous efforts for cross platform UI support on .NET.

Ooof. I've done .net dev in the past, but most of my stuff is not in that space anymore. Are these the mono people working on this?

Has nothing to do with mono. Mono effectively died when Xamarin got acquihired by Microsoft. They shifted focus to providing OSX and Windows only tools for developing mobile apps with .NET, and mono development stalled, but parts got incorporated into dotnet directly.

Microsoft have been much more friendly to open source in recent years. dotnet core is now supported and up to date on Linux. You can develop on Linux with VSCode (Visual Studio is still Windows only) or JetBrains Rider. You can consider dotnet core to be uncoupled from Windows. There are still parts of the .net frameworks which are coupled to windows, but they can be avoided with libraries like Avalonia.

Just a small correction.

Although Visual Studio for Mac started as just a rebranded version from Xamarin Studio, nowadays it shares several key parts with Visual Studio proper, implemented in .NET Core and shared across macOS and Windows.

Ahh, ok thanks for the info.