UI Toolkit Reality Check
Looking at my Linux Desktop usage. What UI toolkits do I really use?
- Firefox: Own (integrated with GTK3)
- LibreOffice: Own
- Lagrange: Own
- Sublime Text/Merge: Own
- Evolution: GTK3
- KeepassXC: Qt
- QOwnNotes: Qt
- Scribus: Qt
- GIMP: GTK3
- Fractal: GTK4
- Pantheon Tasks: GTK3
- Canonical Document Scanner: GTK3
- Element: Electron
- WhatsApp: Electron
- Threema: Electron
- Cider: Electron
- Nextcloud Desktop: Qt
- Nextcloud Tasks: Web App
- Seafile Client: Qt
- Recoll: Qt
- Charm: Qt
- Synapse Launcher: GTK3
- PDF Arranger: GTK3
- Zoom: Own
- Jitsi Meet: Electron
- VLC: Qt
- OBS Studio: Qt
- OpenLP: Qt
- FileZila: wxWidgets
Own/Proprietary: 5 GTK3: 6 GTK4: 1 Qt: 9 Electron/Web: 5 wxWidgets: 1
Or: GTK: 7 (most still using GTK3) Qt: 9 Other: 11
DE dependend: Files, Settings, Terminal
Most important (kind of “business hub”, where linked and integrated data is most important): Evolution
Very important as well: Printing. But I don't really know of any good PDF viewer and/or printing dialog on Linux. They all have their own issues. The software set Linux Mint provides is ok.
In the end I currently tend to choose UI Toolkit and Desktop Environment depending on the PIM suite. That of KDE (Akonadi) is awful. So I'm going for an Evolution based one. Document Scanner is important as well. Mint/Cinnamon works best, Pantheon I like more. Ubuntu Touch uses the same backend as well, which is very interesting, but only Calendar looks nice for now (missing/not functional: Contacts, Tasks, Mail).
Our media workstation for video streaming and projection uses Kubuntu and KDE.