I feel some genuine grief about what GTK has become.
It started out as a toolkit for application development and leaned heavily into the needs of the C developer who was writing an application with a GUI. It was really a breath of fresh air to us crusties who started out with Xaw and Motif. That's the GTK I want to remember.
What it is now is (IMO) mostly a product of the economics of free software development. There's not a lot of bread out there to build a great, free, developer experience for Linux apps. Paid GTK development is just in service of improving the desktop platform that the big vendors ship. This leads to more abstraction breaks between the toolkit, the desktop, and the theme, because nobody cares as long as all the core desktop apps work. "Third party" app developers, who used to be the only audience for GTK, are a distant second place. The third party DX is only good if you follow a cookie-cutter app template.
I switched my long-term personal projects from GTK2 to Dear ImGui, which IMO is the only UI toolkit going that actually prioritizes developer experience. Porting from GTK2 to GTK3 would have been almost as much work since I depended on Clutter (which was at one point a key element of the platform, but got dropped/deprecated -- maybe its corporate sponsor folded? not sure).
It started out as a toolkit for application development and leaned heavily into the needs of the C developer who was writing an application with a GUI. It was really a breath of fresh air to us crusties who started out with Xaw and Motif. That's the GTK I want to remember.
What it is now is (IMO) mostly a product of the economics of free software development. There's not a lot of bread out there to build a great, free, developer experience for Linux apps. Paid GTK development is just in service of improving the desktop platform that the big vendors ship. This leads to more abstraction breaks between the toolkit, the desktop, and the theme, because nobody cares as long as all the core desktop apps work. "Third party" app developers, who used to be the only audience for GTK, are a distant second place. The third party DX is only good if you follow a cookie-cutter app template.
I switched my long-term personal projects from GTK2 to Dear ImGui, which IMO is the only UI toolkit going that actually prioritizes developer experience. Porting from GTK2 to GTK3 would have been almost as much work since I depended on Clutter (which was at one point a key element of the platform, but got dropped/deprecated -- maybe its corporate sponsor folded? not sure).