When comparing Guake vs QTerminal, the Slant community recommends Guake for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for UNIX-like systems?” Guake is ranked 11th while QTerminal is ranked 20th. The most important reason people chose Guake is:
You can hit F12 (by default, though it's customizable) to open a terminal overlay, Quake-style, as a drop-down from the top of the screen.
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Pros
Pro Drop-down terminal
You can hit F12 (by default, though it's customizable) to open a terminal overlay, Quake-style, as a drop-down from the top of the screen.
Pro Supports transparency
Transparency is particularly useful for when you need to refer to the information displayed by application under Guake window.
Pro Hotkey support
Guake is very fast and easy to open with a customizable hotkey, meaning there's no fiddling with menus or icons.
Pro Extremely customizable
Guake's appearance is very customizable: from the transparency to the width and height of the window. You can also choose which key to use for toggling the terminal window.
Pro Available in many popular distro repositories
Guake is available in a lot of repositories for the most popular distros. This makes it very easy to obtain and install on almost any system.
Pro Shortcut key F12 can be used to toggle
The global shortcut key, F12, can be used to easily toggle the terminal window.
Pro Tabs support
Guake supports tabs, while working with them is very easy.
Pro Can choose byobu as shell
You can choose byobu as shell, by adding a line to /etc/shells : " /usr/bin/byobu"
and get guake with byobu ... sweet!
Pro Font ligatures
QTerminal support font ligatures found in fonts like FiraCode.
Pro Lightweight
Compared to many terminal emulators, QTerminal is lightweight with fewer dependencies than most.
Cons
Con Not cross-platform
Linux only, and additionally targeting GTK3.
Con Not very responsive
Occasionally, Guake slows down and is not very responsive.
Con No font ligature
Guake uses vte for its terminal emulation, and vte simply doesn't support font ligature (yes, it's 2019). This is what its maintainer thinks about it.
He really thinks supporting font ligature breaks terminal's grid, like he doesn't understand a font that's monospace is a monospace no matter if it has ligature or not.
Con Window resize
Resizing the window does not resize the contents, like rxvt-unicode does.
Con Strange default paste action
When pasting into QTerminal, one has to be careful as it assumes immediate execution.