Comment Re:Port it to Qt, please! GTK+ is awful! (Score 1) 134
MacOS X and Windows are both second-class citizens. They work poorly and inconsistently, and are not well-maintained ports. You can't build a Windows or MacOS X version of a GTK+ application and expect it to work properly. With Qt, you can. Nowadays with GTK 3.x, even non-Linux and non-GNOME are no longer catered for properly. This isn't new. Windows support was mediocre back in 2004 and it's still mediocre today. MacOS X is arguably worse. Case in point: copy-paste was broken in Inkscape the last few times I've tried it on MacOS X, making it unusable. This is simply due to the primary upstream developers, those that are left at least, not caring at all about these platforms--they never have cared. Working "quite well" is a low bar; stuff needs to work all the time. It's true that it works for simple stuff--a few buttons and text entries. But at soon as you get to a more complex application that starts to use more functionality, you're in a world of frustration as you discover the extent of all the brokenness.
A decade back, GTK+ used to be my toolkit of choice, and I was using it for my day job for a while for use in actual products, writing tutorials and articles on it in professional publications etc. In retrospect, it wasn't that amazing then, the systemic issues it has were there since it began, but it's not even on the radar today for most developers. I'm now a Qt developer, like many others who had to get stuff done and found GTK+ sorely lacking. Building cross-platform OpenGL rendering stuff, it works on every platform without trouble and looks and behaves completely natively, and is a pleasure to work with rather than an exercise in masochism. In 2004 I was regularly filing bugs with patches against GTK+. A few months back, I saw some get closed/wontfix--10 years of tested, unreviewed patches fixing serious problems being ignored and abandoned. What a waste. If it was actually maintained properly, I might possibly still be using it. But if bugs which block your work don't get fixed, even if you put in the effort to fix, test and submit the patches yourself, you end up having to move to something which is actually maintained properly, such as Qt.