Mixing & Matching QT & GTK Apps?
 

Guys i've heard that you shouldn't mix & match GTK & QT apps. So if you want to run QT apps you should run a desktop like KDE & if you want to run GTK apps you should run Gnome, MATE, Ect... I've heard it can lead to system instabilities sometimes. Is there any truth to this?

thanks....

there's no truth to this, esp. about the system instability.
almost every gnu/linux installation uses several gui toolkits side-by-side.
i would, however, NOT install more than 1 complete desktop environment.
oh, and kde apps tend to pull in most of KDE, so always look what will be installed, and make a judgement call, before installing.
if debian-based, you might want to disable "install-recommends".

the only thing that can be troublesome is the looks of qt apps, because they don't necessarily follow the general desktop theme.
have a look at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...K_applications
yes, it's confusing.
there's qt4 and qt5, gtk2 and gtk3...

Nah, you can mix QT and GTK as you want. Just don't expect it to look nice. Try opening an instance of Wine and the file manager in it, and see how nice you think it looks in your QT environment.

Firefox was GTK for a long time, and probably still is. This is one of the reasons it has never really looked like anything in QT, and never really fit in, looks wise. Simply because it was GTK. That might look fine in Gnome 2, but not really in KDE.

Anyways, I can't wait until we get some mature Wayland versions. Things will change then, I am pretty sure. Graphical toolkits will just become a way to render graphic inside a unified compositor. GTK and QT mixing should not be a problem in that case.

Anyways, as long as you have the underlying technology of whatever app/program you are trying to run, installed. It will work just fine regardless of being GTK or QT.

So if you trying different DE just make sure you uninstall one before you install the other?

It just sounds like if your using a GTK+ system and you want to pull in a QT app you might bloat your system (disk usage) because the QT app will pull in a lot of dependencies but it won't necessarily make your system unstable. Do i sound like i got it about right?

that sounds like a good recipe to break your system.

not all qt apps will do that.
in fact most won't.
but kde apps will.
i think you're confusing Qt (a gui toolkit) with KDE (a full-blown desktop environment).
kde happens to use the qt toolkit.

The main objection I've heard about running both QT and GTK apps on the same system is that they won't look consistent. (A consistent desktop appearance is more important to some than to others.) As long as the required libraries are present, the applications should run just fine.

My experience does not accord with this statement.

I often have more than one DE installed. That Debian computer over there (------>) has Gnome and KDE and I am currently using the Fluxbox window manager as the GUI. The one it replaced had MATE and KDE on it with no conflicts for several years. (The only conflict was with an electro-magnetic pulse.)

Slackware comes out-of-the-box with two DEs (XFCE and KDE) and four window managers. When I first started using Slackware (v. 10), it also came with Gnome, but Pat dropped that with v. 11 or v. 12 I forget which, but not because of conflicts, but for development reasons.

when has it ever been a problem to have multiple desktop environments installed? It shouldn't be an issue at all. One can select which one to start from the display manager in X.

I understand what you are getting at though, as Gnome has literally created tons of problems being installed side-by-side with other desktops for various reasons, including their choice of network manager.

I run apps based on their functionality, not whether they are gtk or qt. I have a mix, never had an issue. Then again I don't run desktop environments, only window managers. Only time a qt app did something funky was when I had a wildcard background and foreground color applied in my .Xresources file. Made all qt apps black and green. Easy fix.

No.

And this isn't even "obsolete information"; it was never true at any time.

Back in the day (I'd just installed Fedora 1) when I'd only ever used a simple window manager, I installed both Gnome and KDE, and I used them on alternate days until I decided which I prefered. Nothing disastrous happened! The only irritation is that the menu has two of everthing: editor, terminal editor, file manager, etc, etc.

These days, AntiX actually installs two desktops, Ice and Rox.

"Back in the day..." I did, actually, have issues with running either KDE application under GNOME or the other way around -- I don't recall which.
put simply invoking an application from one of them on the other would result in the desktop window being taken over by the new desktop manager and menus being chnaged.
Nowadays I use a few DEs with no issues.