Nobody has a user-space stick big enough to force things in the Linux world.

When Apple dropped the old audio APIs of classic macOS and introduced CoreAudio, they pissed off a lot of developers, but those developers had no choice. In the GUI realm, they only deprecated HIKit for a decade or two before removing it (if they've even done that), but they made it very clear that CoreFoo was the API you should be using and that was that.

In Linux-land, nobody has that authority. Nobody can come up with an equivalent to Core* for Linux and enforce its use. Consequently, you're going to continue to see the Qt/GTK/* splits, where the only commonality is at the lowest level of the window system (though, to Qt's credit, optionally also the event loop).

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mikkupikku 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

GNOME has enough weight to at least force most projects to accommodate them. But unfortunately this has mostly been for the worst, as GNOME is usually the odd one out with most matters of taste and design.

	▲	jcgl 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe to some degree that's true. But let's take an example: GNOME is the only (afaik) desktop that requires client-side decorations. They've been like that for years, but nobody else is following them on that. Yes, the toolkits and a number of toolkit-less apps have added support for them. But it's not like they were actually able to employ their gravity to change the world over to CSD (thank goodness).

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dTal 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

systemd comes close, and can be viewed as an attempt to create such a stick...