Since I have started using Lazarus, I always used the default widgetset the OS/distribution packages Lazarus was compiled and installed with to also build my own executables. Without having spent a moment of thought about it, that happened to be GTK+/GTK2, and my custom applications work well and look fine.
However, the writing for GTK2 is on the wall, and has been for some time - the next releases of big and certainly relevant distros like Red Hat Enterprise Linux will probably ship withoput GTK2 libraries in their repos, which will make starting an application linking those libs tough to do. Gtk2 hasn't been maintained upstream since 2018, and even gtk3 is in "no feature development"-mode, as the toolkit's devs have shifted their focus on gtk4.
Luckily, as far as I understand it, there's a GTK3 port of LCL available, and after having installed it, appears usable. Searching on both the forums and the wiki, I am a bit unsure what its actual status is - the Wiki lists it as being
"alpha status", while there are no
bounties listed.
What's missing to promote GTK3 to the default non-Qt toolkit (if there is such a thing
) for GNU/Linux hosts? Are there any bounties that should be created (I'm only a casual user, but I would readily and gladly chip in a few dozen Euros if that could make someone skilled enough more willing to spend their time on this) to help move this forward?
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