This is an opinion. Not even a shower thought, but something that I just realized I could express succinctly.
I’m a TUI/CLI person. I look first for CLI programs, and only if I don’t find a way to do it in a shell do I look at GUI alternatives.
I’m also a tiling WM person. I used i3 for several years, and then bspwm for a hot minute, and for nearly a year now have been in herbstluftwm. I’m at a point where hlwm not running on Wayland is the main reason I’m not on Wayland.
But at one point, before discovering the joys of tiling, I was a big KDE fan. So it’s been interesting to find myself skipping Qt apps in favor of GTK apps when I have to use GUI apps; and just now I realized why:
When you pull a GTK app, only rarely does it link in a bunch of Gnome dependencies; when it does, it’s usually pretty obvious in the name or description… “X for Gnome” or some such. But Qt apps are really bad about hooking in and pulling a bunch of KDE dependencies, launching KDE services, and generally trying to turn your WM into KDE, that I’ve learned to just avoid them. There’s no reason for them to, unless it’s because the KDE libraries provide so much functionality that isn’t in the core Qt libraries.
Anyway, it just occurred to me why I have such a negative knee-jerk reaction to apps with Qt dependencies; I literally just filter them out as I’m scanning package lists.
I like Qt; I don’t like that most Qt apps also depend on KDE libraries.
Just a little note: Seems like you’re conflating QT apps with KDE apps. KTorrent, Amarok, Elisa, etc will pull half of KDE with them, transmission-qt, qbittorrent, strawberry, clementine and VLC won’t.
I use KDE Plasma, but I honestly prefer GNOME. The main reason I use KDE is because it doesn’t break stuff all that often, whereas GNOME keeps breaking my extensions.
I honestly don’t care about the DE, and I would use a tiling wm if it worked properly with Wayland and was easy enough for my kids to learn. I just need it to launch apps and stay out of the way. Both largely handle that, though I need an extension to auto hide the top bar in GNOME (or maybe it was a GNOME Tweak Tool thing), and I’ve had that break.
I agree. If I used a DE, it’d be KDE.
I wouldn’t force a tiling window manager on anyone. I think that’s the end of a journey of discovery about how mice are great tools for some jobs, but making them the core interface tool and building UIs around them was a great evil. When you realize keyboards are still the best interface, and eventually arrive at TWMs, that’s good. But TWMs are kind of nasty for folks raised in a world where most systems they encounter are Windows or Macs.
It’s also kind of nasty with software that was designed for a mouse, which is pretty much everything.
I get 90% of the benefits of a tiling WM with KDE/GNOME shortcuts and tmux, and avoid pretty much all of the downsides. It’s not quite as nice for dev vs my old XMonad setup, but it’s way nicer for random GUI software (looking at you, GIMP and Steam).
My kids honestly haven’t really used Windows or macOS, they’ve mostly used my Linux computers (both currently run Plasma 6) and ChromeOS at school. Even my 4yo can launch and run Minecraft on my computer, and there’s no way they’d be able to grok a keyboard without knowing the alphabet first. The mouse is fantastic for lowering the barrier to using a computer, it’s just not as effective as a keyboard.
Honestly, I don’t like GTK apps either. I dislike them less than Qt apps for the same reasons you give. But GTK stuff is still really heavy and bulky and pulls in a lot of dependencies even if it’s not quite so bad as Qt stuff.
When I can, I use apps that just depend on xlib or (even better) xcb. I’m a huge fan of suckless software, for instance. (Well, like you, when I can, I use a CLI program. But if there just isn’t a reasonable way to do something without a GUI, xlib/xcb is the way I prefer to go. But that isn’t often an option. Like, if you want a full-featured browser, it’s GTK whether it’s Firefox or Chromium.)
I did make the jump to a Wayland compositor. (Sway. It’s as close to a drop-in replacement for i3+X11 as you can get.) So I guess even better than xlib/xcb would be the Wayland library. But in most cases I’d rather use X programs that are in my distro’s repositories than go outside of my distro’s repositories to use Wayland equivalents. (Like, I use “dmenu” because there isn’t a Wayland equivalent in the Arch repository. I am specifically in the process of switching from Arch to Gentoo, though, so it’s very possible that could change things moving forward.)
Also, just because it’s apropos, I have literally written my own domain-specific language just so I could avoid using a GUI for one specific use case. Lol.
