# GTK 85 Hacker News commenters recommended GTK and 118 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Mature free toolkit for building Linux desktop apps, praised for stability, light resource use and GNOME consistency. Critics cite frequent breaking changes between versions. ## Why people recommend it - Stable, well documented, easy to use (2 comments): "the last release is stable and there's no technical reason to remove it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47167243)) "have always been robust, stable, well documented, and easy to use" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199627)) - Light and snappy, low memory use (2 comments): "It's a very snappy and low resource usage toolkit aimed entirely at desktop computers." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47649203)) "Classic GTK is (much) better (RSS on Linux): GTK2 14 MB GTK3 24 MB GTK4 98 MB" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235783)) - Good community and native apps (2 comments): "The community is doing a great job with creating GTK4 native applications." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827334)) "every Gnome or Gtk app I've tried appears to be working perfectly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449165)) - Good language bindings via GI (2 comments): "For GUI it has really good bindings for the major frameworks QT,GTK" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47420658)) "And GTK has GI which allows to basically autogenerate bindings." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368828)) ## What people warn about - Frequent breaking changes between versions (4 comments): "Now GTK or libadwaita seem designed to resist themes and introduce constant breaking of selectors or widgets" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50108110)) "It is a CADT program: every new version is a complete and incompatible implementation of the old version." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45834120)) "its developers don't help by completely rewriting things every few years and breaking all existing code" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47479044)) - Drops support for older versions (3 comments): "it is not supported anymore. you can't build or run GKT2 based apps on new systems without building the GTK2 libraries yourself." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47807111)) "If you made an app in GTK 1 (which looks beautiful, by the way, compared to modern GTK), people won't be able to just install it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002143)) "hidden behind an unaccessible configuration option, and now it's hopelessly broken in modern GTK version" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588576)) - Looks like a poor macOS copy (2 comments): "to me it (well, mainly Gnome) looks and feels like trying to copy macOS without understanding what makes it great" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123467)) "I wouldn't consider it robust nor easy to use. But most importantly, it doesn't look good, especially on macOS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49202748)) - Missing features in dialogs and layout (2 comments): "Vertically aligning a set of decimal numbers with the separator the same place would be challenging in GTK and Qt" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505212)) "I really miss Gtk3/4 File->open dialogs having the ability to take pasted filepaths without erroring out." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833241)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Qt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/qt.md): 191 recommend - [Windows Forms](https://hackerapproved.com/p/winforms.md): 76 recommend - [SwiftUI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/swiftui.md): 75 recommend - [Tcl/Tk](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tcl-tk.md): 61 recommend - [Avalonia UI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/avalonia.md): 51 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "GTK", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gtk/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).