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Recently, the Linux Mint Blog published Monthly News – April 2024, which goes into detail about wanting to fork and maintain older GNOME apps in collaboration with other GTK-based desktop environments. Despite the good intentions of the author, Clem, many readers interpreted this as an attack against GNOME. Specifically: GTK, libadwaita, the relationship between them, and their relevance to any desktop environment or desktop operating system. Unfortunately, many of these readers seem to have a lot of difficulty understanding what GTK is trying to be, and how libadwaita helps. In this article, we’ll look at the history of why and how libadwaita was born, the differences between GTK 4 and libadwaita in terms of scope of support, their relevance to each desktop environment and desktop operating system, and the state of GTK 4 today.
It means that on systems with apps installed written with libadwaita, will also have libadwaita installed, rather than just GTK. But those apps will look like GNOME apps, which might look out of place on e.g. a Windows or Xfce desktop.