gtk - garbage toolkit

GTk is bloated trash due to its dependencies like GLib, cairo and DBus.
Qt4/5 is equally bloated C++ garbage.

OpenVG used to be a saner alternative to cairo, but it's fallen by the wayside and support for it in Gallium has been dropped and might end up getting removed from Mesa in the future.

So if you were to throw away gtk and qt, and starting from first principles, how would you go about building a minimalist themable widget library on top of GL/GLES for Wayland that can be used to build a desktop where applications have a common look-and-feel?

Dunno about the others, but the dumbest thing IMHO about GTK is that it doesn't use the standard file dialogs on Windows or OSX. I understand that it's pretty much impossible for a cross-platform GUI toolkit to feel "native" but holy shit, you have to draw the line somewhere.

Speaking of which, there really should have been some kind of freedesktop.org standard that allows you to register your own file dialog (either by creating a separate process, or with some kind of bloated bullshit IPC solution). It's really dumb that GTK and Qt apps have to use different file dialogs.

>>19

I understand that it's pretty much impossible for a cross-platform GUI toolkit to feel "native"

No it's not, you just use the platform's widgets. The only difference in feel will be how slow and memory-consuming the UI becomes, but that is a common feature of cross-platform stuff and it will still look exactly like the native one, because it's just a bloated wrapper around it.

The real problem is that on Linux, there is no "native" set of UI common dialogs. Perhaps the ones from WINE could be used.

>>24

The real problem is that on Linux, there is no "native" set of UI common dialogs.

There's (almost) always a native toolkit, but you can't know in advance. It's not a problem though. Use Qt and it will look fine and work better than non-Qt apps. This goes for Windows and MacOS too.

Plus if you use Qt you will probably get D-Bus correct as a side-effect and I can automate your shitty software through D-Bus calls so I won't have to touch it myself. Yeah, D-Bus is a horrorshow, but it works and it has the most cross-platform presence of the available rpc mechanisms.