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Recently, the Linux Mint Blog published Monthly News – April 2024, which goes into detail about wanting to fork and maintain older GNOME apps in collaboration with other GTK-based desktop environments. Despite the good intentions of the author, Clem, many readers interpreted this as an attack against GNOME. Specifically: GTK, libadwaita, the relationship between them, and their relevance to any desktop environment or desktop operating system. Unfortunately, many of these readers seem to have a lot of difficulty understanding what GTK is trying to be, and how libadwaita helps. In this article, we’ll look at the history of why and how libadwaita was born, the differences between GTK 4 and libadwaita in terms of scope of support, their relevance to each desktop environment and desktop operating system, and the state of GTK 4 today.
So I guess the implication here is apps written explicitly for libadwaita will not be usable on generic GTK. So a calculator, for instance, that uses AdwDialog won’t be executable on a platform that doesn’t support libadwaita, like windows.
Will an app dependent on libadwaita be usable on linux without gnome? Like xfce, or xmonad?
Windows supports libadwaita
of course it will, that’s not the point, the point is to make apps that use libadwaita look consistent even in platforms outside of GNOME
Ok, I thought the article was saying libadwaita was to add special features and styles for use in gnome specific apps.
Don’t worry, this article is mainly to clear some misunderstanding about libadwaita anyway, having questions about it is natural