Reason - I don't do cross platform, I do Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is about Gtk. Qt for Ubuntu is an afterthought, especially after they declared Kubuntu a community project, it was never as polished as Ubuntu anyway.
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no, you can switch backends, to have the GTK libs run under Wayland or X11... You can specify the backend with the GDK_BACKEND variable.
And you don't need a wayland display server, you just need the core wayland libraries. I guess the issue with the GTK backends is that it's not truly modular, and it needs to load the dependancies for all compiled in backends at run time, instead of just loading the specified backend like QT...
...but the dependancies really are not that much.
Sure they don't contribute to some projects in the open - they prefer to modify stuff in their own forks to avoid other benefiting from their enhancements.
I don't see any problem with the decision at this time. Wayland is not mature or ready for general consumption in any way, so why should they ship GTK with Wayland support? The very few users that like to experiment with Wayland just need to compile/install a Wayland-capable build of GTK. No big deal.
...except for the fact, that anyone can take ubuntu's patches (and/or sources) for any given app/lib/etc and use them if they like, as some people do... for example, in the AUR (Archlinux User Repository) there are versions of software that include certain ubuntu patches.
Ubutnu/Canonical 'prefer' there own forked code because (in many cases) there patches would most likely be rejected by their corresponding upstream (developers) anyway. Ubuntu's patches often aren't useful (from the developers perspective) and/or don't fit into the upstream project's goals. ie: why would gnome want to add ubuntu's patches to gnome-system-settings? (that are only useful for Unity), or why would gnome want to add ubuntu's gtk2/3 patches for overlay scrollbars? (which for me anyway, would be a feature i would NOT want).
They wouldn't be much if all it did was require the packages be installed. But requiring the wayland libraries and their dependencies be loaded into memory, even though nothing in Ubuntu is likely to be using them any time in the next year or two? I think that's a reasonable blocker... no good reason to proceed with shipping Wayland-enabled Gtk+ until the Gtk+ backends can be isolated more effectively.
It's Qt, not QT.
Come on guys.
Yes, Qt should have been their choice, but they were biased towards Gtk from the get go, plus, their developers are like script kiddies, they like writing a lot of stuff in Python even when it's a bad idea (software center and other core sophisticated stuff is written in Python, no wonder it loads like a fat cow).