Story

If I was in the same situation as these developers, I'd choose a 'Desktopless' toolkit. So-called 'Desktop Environments' are a total failure in Linux. Both the KDE and Gnome guys are trying to implement an operating system solely in userspace and it doesn't work so well.

Take the basic task of automounting for example. On my Gnome-based system (XFCE, which somehow makes use of GNOME daemons), it never works right. Sometimes it doesn't mount at all, sometimes it immediately mounts something I just unmounted etc. Come on man, it's 2014 and we're still dealing with this?

Since this stuff doesn't work so well, it changes constantly and you have to chase the GNOME/KDE guys just to make your application compile.

Tying your application to a desktop environment is a sure way to kill it. Now they're complaining about the GNOME stupidity, who knows KDE won't do the same thing? Money-backed big projects tend to attract tons of hippies and they really know how to mess up a good system. See firefox, gnome, systemd, chrome, etc.

GUI toolkits are a done deal. There is nothing left to be discovered with the current hardware. You can port them to newer features of graphics cards or X11 extensions but that's about it. The endless tail chasing Gtk+ and Qt does is nothing more than make-work. Come to think of it, if I just want to display some dialog and get some input, what drastical change has occured since the year 2000? Why can't we just use something done at that time for these basic tasks? Where is the need for updating the button-drawing code for the n-th million time?

I'd definitely go for a desktopless toolkit. There is nobody to mess it up and my program is likely to compile for a long time. There are tons of these: fox, fltk, wxwidgets, even java swing is a better choice than gnome+gtk. If you want advanced features like video playback or HTML display, it's a different matter but for an application which only needs standard controls? I'd never touch GTK or Qt.