SuperSpruce, 2 years ago

I’m not the most knowledgeable on this subject, but I’m curious to learn more.

Why do various toolkits have major releases that seem to reset the features of the last one?

GTK 3 seems like GTK 2 but slower to me, and before the transition was even complete GTK 4 showed up, which just seems like GTK 3 but a bit different. Qt 5 works really well and is efficient on resources, so why are we switching to Qt 6? It seems like reinventing the desktop over and over again.

I understand updates for the kernel for compatibility, small to medium updates to all software for bug fixes and new features, and major updates to toolkits when there are big problems with the current release (X vs Wayland for example). Or if the current release was unreliable and bloated, which I heard was what happened with Qt 4 and why they switched to 5. But I also heard Qt 3 was really stable and lightweight, so why did they switch away from it?