Technical Vision for Qt 6

I like QML but it's not that great for many / most desktop applications. It works better for creating fully custom touch UIs from scratch. The plan for Qt 6 mentions a styling API which is one of the most important missing pieces, and discussion in the comments maybe indicates more ready to use controls.

As a simple example, I hack on a Qt app on a Raspberry Pi (it has a tiny display on it and I run a dashboard). It’s only got 512MB of RAM and spinning up a JVM server to run my builds will likely cause it to run out of RAM. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of CMake, but it sure solves a lot of problems while being quite lightweight. And I’ll take it over qmake, mostly because I know CMake well enough and haven’t ever really gotten into the guts of qmake. CMake is more general purpose.

You mentioned "native UI SDKs" having become preferrable, but keep in mind that in many scenarios, Qt is the native UI.

On desktop Linux there isn't a lower level toolkit Qt is translating to, but also in the many embedded products Qt is used on: Car and aviation infotainment (a prominent example is Mercedes-Benz' MBUX OS, but there's literally dozens of these built on Qt and shipping), medical equipment, industrial machines (e.g. the entire HMI sector), kiosk systems, coffee makers, ... Qt is an excellent choice for these, often the only one, and the web stack is very unattractive there due to performance/hardware overhead, quality, security, etc. They're product use cases in industry, with a lot of available very high-paying jobs.

And it's worth keeping in mind that the use cases I cited above by and large pay better than making desktop software does today, unless you're an entrenched player like Autodesk (which uses Qt doe many of its apps). In the only "this pays for a decently sized staff of engineers" desktop app products that are new that I can think of, Qt is also still doing well - say, Pix4D's apps for drone mapping/photogrammetry - because they likewise solve hard problems where you don't want to deal with the web API abstraction/quality barrier and performance overhead.

My bottom line here is: Right now, and very likely ten years from now, if you are good at at Qt you're probably going to work in a very good and stable job at a solid business. I don't see this being the case for Electron developers, and I know where I'd rather be.

As for making desktop apps, if your experience is "Looking at setting up alone, With Qt you have to struggle to compile a massive library which inevitably won't work" it shouldn't be ignored and the developer experience should be improved - tooling, build system and getting modules to devs are all mentioned in this blog. However, I have to say this has never been my experience - between Qt being packaged in Linux distros and the SDK installer on other platforms it's never been hard to set up Qt for me.