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I apologize, in advance, for my blunt answer. But in my opinion QT apps are generally crap. They look bad. Their UI is generally not well designed. QT itself does not lend itself to creating apps with good UI design. Of course, many will disagree with my opinions on this, and that is perfectly fine with me. I'm sincerely happy that people who do like QT apps have a good selection of them.

Why learn GTK+? Because (and I am intentionally avoiding words like "most" or "majority" here) a substantial portion of your potential users are like me and prefer GTK+ apps to QT apps.

Edited 2008-04-20 21:03 UTC

Well, in my opinion, your opinion sucks. You didn't bother to offer details or examples to back up your opinion, and thus your opinion is neither insightful nor instructive. But hey, it's just my opinion, so don't bother disagreeing with me.

Oh come now, arguing that one should *develop a new app* in GTK+ just because *existing apps* that use GTK+ are easier to use than Qt-based ones is no argument whatsoever.

That's like advising a musician to produce new music using just electric guitars and not keyboards or computers, because a larger percent of mainstream music involves electric guitars whereas a lot of music made with keyboards and computers is challenging to listen to.

But why should someone *comfortable and efficient when using keyboards and computers*, who is nonetheless going for a mainstream aesthetic, force himself to use just guitars?

Actually, the analogy is even more extreme than is the case with GTK+ vs Qt, because the difference in "user taste" when it comes to GTK+ vs Qt *purely in terms of widget aesthetics* is arguably less than the difference between a note produced on an electric guitar versus a keyboard.

The fact is, there is nothing stopping people from creating simple, easy to use GUIs with Qt. I think the main problem with Qt apps is that people are always trying to show off all they can do thanks to the fact that the architecture makes a lot of hard things trivial. Whereas GTK+ apps are limited by virtue of the fact that they actually can't do all that much without some serious effort put into them. Is it a design philosophy, or simply a side effect?

Anyway, with KDE 4 we're starting to see the marriage of good, simple UI design with the power of Qt. Thus proving how possible it really is.

Edited 2008-04-21 02:24 UTC

I'm a little surprised, despite your qualifier, that's a pretty subjective and totally unquantifiable answer, when you're usually more objective.

In that light, I would argue that the majority of users don't give a crap about what the GUI looks like. That's a typical GTK-type response whenever someone points out the superiority of Qt's framework over GTK (but we have *HIG* !!!!), but at the end of the day developers will choose the framework that works best for what they want to accomplish, not for what the users prefer. And users, for that matter, will generally choose their apps on merit. If you look at OSX or Windows, you very rarely see applications with anything regarding GUI consistency. Microsoft and Apple break their own guidelines all the time, let alone the third-party vendors. It's only linux where this argument is ever brought up, as if it has merit.

Ah, OSNews's personal GTK troll strikes again.
If you don't have anything intelligent to say, why bother saying it?



Personal preference, completely irrelevant.



And once again, completely unsubstantiated claims.



You sir, are an idiot and know nothing about programming frameworks. Thanks for playing though.



No one that isn't a geek (and on top of that, hugely misinformed as you are) will ever care about the distinction, as long as there isn't anythign fundamentally wrong.