Why Are Modern X11 Tookits Not Written For Xt?

Vinodh D Rajan asks: "Being fed up with the disparate look and feel among the Linux toolkits and incompatibilities between them, I recently started studying the user interfaces available under Linux, something I called The Unified Linux Desktop. For this I started studying how GTK+, QT, FLTK, GNUstep, Motif, Xaw, etc all work. The more I studied them, the more I wondered as to why modern tookits are not written against the Xt standard, since it is the one that has been standardized. Since Motif has been so successful, why not spend effort trying to improve it and provide a common framework for component development, instead writing incompatible toolkits?"

"I am sure that any inadequacies in Xt can be improved. Projects like neXtaw dramatically improves Xaw look and feel. Why not just develop the standards instead of developing newer stuff that is incompatible with standards. Besides the way GTK+'s object system works, seems almost similar to Xt's object system. Apart from cross platform development concerns, what made GTK+ developers write their own subsystem instead of using Xt."

Comments

Motif is simply unapproachable for the beginner

[ikekrull]

I dabble with C, Java, Perl and other languages.

I am a 'child of the internet' when it comes to programming - i.e everything i know about computers and programming i either learnt from the net, or from books I bought because i wanted to expand the knowldege i gained from the net.

If i had gone to university, maybe i would have been exposed to Motif, but since its a Windows world out there for most of the youth today, theyre going to look for something more immediately similar to the Win32 API.

When i look around the net for information, there just isn't anything obviously useful for Motif - You can get so much more done, so much faster, if you use the amazing open-source technologies like GTK+, GNOME, Qt, SDL etc.

Since Motif has been opened, we might see more, but from my point of view, Motif is a dead horse (an ugly dead horse at that), which i simply see no need to bother with. If you have a huge, existing application that uses Motif, then you probably want to persist with it, but if youre starting fresh, why would you use Motif?

The question really should be 'What does OpenMotif bring to the table for the open source developer compared to the existing standards like GTK+ and Qt?'