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.