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timcobbtoday at 1:13 PM5 repliesview on HN

Yeah, I was kind of surprised recently that there's no solid native way to build desktop apps on Linux! I was thinking I'd build something actually native with AI but then the options were QT or or gtk...


Replies

preg_matchtoday at 2:09 PM

Qt is as solid as it gets. It's very, very high quality. Much higher quality than Microsoft's frameworks on Windows.

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disiplustoday at 1:25 PM

You don't care what were you trying to build but for a quick me alone Linux app I used Flutter. Honestly it's my go-to when I want to have a quick native app on any platform but dont want to bundle electron.

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blep-arshtoday at 2:34 PM

QT and GTK are as native (and solid, I guess) as it gets, since there's no "default" UI toolkit that's shipped along with the kernel, unlike e.g. Windows or macOS. Speaking of Windows, why do they even ship browser-UI apps as a part of the OS? Do they find native Windows UI development too hard or feature-limited even with LLM assistance?

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ilikehurdlestoday at 1:43 PM

Well what does native mean? An XWindow? Native on gnome is different from native on kde or xfce or lxde…

bpfrhtoday at 2:44 PM

I mean there is the no true linux argument, but covering the main stream desktops you basically have kde which is written with qt(so qt is native) or gnome which is written with gtk and both frameworks/DEs do implement other things besides "just" the gui, so you are native.