>Not sure why you'd knock the way GIMP and Inkscape LAF on other systems; they both look perfectly native on Windows, and much better than the majority of cruddy MacOS desktop app wrappers

In my experience Qt apps behave much better on Windows and Mac because they're designed to be native first. GTK was never designed to do that, it started out as a clone of Motif and it only ran on Unix, the cross-platform support was added later when some Windows developers wanted to port GIMP to Windows. To me GIMP and Inkscape always had some weird GTK widgets that don't look or act anything like Win32 widgets. I'd say use Qt if you want a better native experience on mac and windows.

>The GNOME team never opened libadwaita for public comment, or held any forums where I could voice concerns with the direction they were headed. I can understand how this all sounds accusatory, but I really do recommend that you research it.

I've researched it. This isn't how open source works, projects are not driven by public comments on forums. They're driven by people showing up to work together on a shared goal. Those who show up and write the code, get to be the decision makers.

>The community has been completely locked out of the GNOME decision-making process.

It doesn't make much sense to say this, the whole point here is the community makes the decisions for itself and nobody else. Every single contributor past the original founders are from the community.

>They won't accept contributions that allow cross-platform stylesheets

>the GNOME team pretty much doesn't care about anything the community has to say. It's a bad direction for the project to be heading in, and it definitely makes it harder for regular people to write good-looking, system-agnostic GTK apps

I've no idea where you got this. I've never seen any comments from libadwaita developers to suggest that. This doesn't need to be contributed either, if you have a stylesheet you want to work on you can just ship it as part of your app, or create another add-on library for platform extensions similar to this: https://github.com/GNOME/gtk-mac-integration

Regardless of where it ends up, the styles for GIMP on Win32 is just a theme, if that's not available in newer versions then somebody needs to port it to the new theming system. You could wait for a GIMP contributor to do it but that might take a long time.

>It was a really good library until it hit v14, when the developers lobbed off support for Glade files

I might still be misunderstanding, but the break was caused by GTK4. The GTK3 bindings are a separate crate. You can use those until the GTK4 gui designer is released. Breaking glade wasn't done on purpose.

>v9.0.0 allowed you to build programs functionally and register their various interfaces as closures. This made it fairly simple to not only separate UI code from function code, but was also really comfortable to write "like a normal app". v14 eliminated this workflow though

I can't really figure out what you mean for sure but I did some searches. Closure support is still there but it appears to have been moved to another crate called gtk-rs-core.

https://gtk-rs.org/gtk-rs-core/stable/0.14/docs/glib/closure...

https://gtk-rs.org/gtk-rs-core/stable/0.14/docs/glib/macro.c...