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A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

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Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#41

Post by zozbot234 »

shmerl wrote: post #40
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend the KDE neon distro to every Linux-curious person I meet. It's the latest and greatest KDE on top of an Ubuntu base, and it's by far the best desktop distro I have tried in my ~20 years of using Linux on the desktop.

I use KDE in Debian testing for a long time already. Easily the best DE around. Though I wish Debian would get faster updates. Even though testing is supposed to be rolling (besides freezes), something seriously stalls new Plasma uploads there.

Typically, "slower" updates in Debian testing are due to the fact that the new package version has known breakage that makes it unsuitable for release, or requires dependencies to be updated and this in turn breaks existing packages (either the build, or the package itself). These situations have to be managed via a "transitions" mechanism. When in doubt, there is a tracker at https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php that reports on why a newer version of the package has yet to enter the testing channel.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#42

Post by shmerl »

zozbot234 wrote: post #41
shmerl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use KDE in Debian testing for a long time already. Easily the best DE around. Though I wish Debian would get faster updates. Even though testing is supposed to be rolling (besides freezes), something seriously stalls new Plasma uploads there.

Typically, "slower" updates in Debian testing are due to the fact that the new package version has known breakage that makes it unsuitable for release, or requires dependencies to be updated and this in turn breaks existing packages (either the build, or the package itself). These situations have to be managed via a "transitions" mechanism. When in doubt, there is a tracker at https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php that r…

Usually, but it's not the case here. In the case you described, you'll see the new upload in unstable, that didn't get to testing yet. In this case, it's simply not there at all:

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/plasma-desktop

So I wonder if there is some kind of other blocker.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#43

Post by K0SM0S »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #27
shmerl wrote: post #3

It would be good for KDE to get stronger backing, but I've heard RedHat avoids backing KDE and focuses on Gnome, due to aversion¹ to contributor agreements², is that correct in that case? 1. https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems 2. https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-qt

I recommend the KDE neon distro to every Linux-curious person I meet. It's the latest and greatest KDE on top of an Ubuntu base, and it's by far the best desktop distro I have tried in my ~20 years of using Linux on the desktop.

A fantastic DE experience indeed.

Just some advice: public consensus is that if you don't want the bleeding edge of KDE, Kubuntu is basically just as good (KDE over Ubuntu) and reportedly is more compatible with various hardware — so if your laptop has issues with Neon, try Kubuntu as a nearly identical alternative.

Note that you can get KDE on any major distro, e.g. Fedora, Arch. I can't recommend it enough, KDE is the dream DE — great out-of-the-box, but settings for pretty much everything, set each once and then forget it as it gets out of your way without sacrificing any feature whatsoever. There are a few minor glitches, but much less so than Gnome or MacOS or Win 10 in my anecdotal experience (notwithstanding display support, that's driver-related and whole other ballgame).

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#44

Post by lbeltrame »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #27
shmerl wrote: post #3

It would be good for KDE to get stronger backing, but I've heard RedHat avoids backing KDE and focuses on Gnome, due to aversion¹ to contributor agreements², is that correct in that case? 1. https://opensource.com/article/19/2/cla-problems 2. https://www.qt.io/legal-contribution-agreement-qt

I recommend the KDE neon distro to every Linux-curious person I meet. It's the latest and greatest KDE on top of an Ubuntu base, and it's by far the best desktop distro I have tried in my ~20 years of using Linux on the desktop.

To be pedantic, Neon is not a distro, it's a project made by some KDE contributors (they state so themselves) and FTR is by no means the "official" distribution by KDE.

Disclaimer: I package the KDE software stack for another distribution (openSUSE).

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#45

Post by zozbot234 »

shmerl wrote: post #42
zozbot234 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typically, "slower" updates in Debian testing are due to the fact that the new package version has known breakage that makes it unsuitable for release, or requires dependencies to be updated and this in turn breaks existing packages (either the build, or the package itself). These situations have to be managed via a "transitions" mechanism. When in doubt, there is a tracker at https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php that r…

Usually, but it's not the case here. In the case you described, you'll see the new upload in unstable, that didn't get to testing yet. In this case, it's simply not there at all: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/plasma-desktop So I wonder if there is some kind of other blocker.

Looks like it's being kept out of unstable until other transitions are complete. E.g. see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=919218

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#46

Post by shmerl »

zozbot234 wrote: post #45
shmerl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually, but it's not the case here. In the case you described, you'll see the new upload in unstable, that didn't get to testing yet. In this case, it's simply not there at all: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/plasma-desktop So I wonder if there is some kind of other blocker.

Looks like it's being kept out of unstable until other transitions are complete. E.g. see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=919218

Interesting. Hopefully once this is resolved, new Plasma will follow.

And regarding KDE and Qt. I wish Qt already would have Vulkan options instead of OpenGL, and KWin would use it as well.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#47

Post by ahartmetz »

laxd wrote: post #19
neilsimp1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. Define "better" here.

Not a fan of electron at all. But I think it points out the direction for the future of gui. There's a whole generation of new languages (rust, go, dart, D, ...) that wants to get into the gui-space and finding QT and GTK problematic. QT is known for "using every C++ feature", making it less than ideal for bindings. GTK is not very cross platform I think, and is criticized for beeing gnome-centric. Both toolkits are…

Two points. Qt isn't using every C++ feature - it works fine without exceptions and generally feels fairly pedestrian to use (that's a feature). It is very much not a template hell like some parts of Boost.

Second, it has QML, which is a declarative UI framework with great runtime performance.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#48

Post by Nokinside »

toyg wrote: post #37

Trolltech were pretty awesome, in their days. The “poison-pill BSD” setup is pretty smart; if i remember correctly , it was introduced when they started wobbling a bit from the commercial perspective, in order to keep the community calm while they went looking for buyers (which they eventually found in Nokia). It would be sad if the switch had to be triggered at a time when QT is supposed to be “back in the game” aft…

>If you can’t make money from Qt, it’s not because of the license.

QT stock is up 124% this year, +247,06% last 3 years.

Qt has de facto monopoly in embedded, medical, automotive, appliance and industry automation. It works in Embedded Linux, INTEGRITY, QNX, and VxWorks.

Qt just launched Qt for MCUs (bare metal toolkit for low end microcontrollers). It runs on Cortex-M with several different 2D accelerators. It's yet another market with no serious competitors.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#49

Post by comex »

mjevans wrote: post #33
laxd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a fan of electron at all. But I think it points out the direction for the future of gui. There's a whole generation of new languages (rust, go, dart, D, ...) that wants to get into the gui-space and finding QT and GTK problematic. QT is known for "using every C++ feature", making it less than ideal for bindings. GTK is not very cross platform I think, and is criticized for beeing gnome-centric. Both toolkits are…

I'd like the pain-point parties (Apple, Microsoft) to just ship open-source linkable libraries of somekind in their app stores. If OSX, Windows, and the mobile stores carried a common framework developers could target it would become a defacto UI standard since you could finally develop a cross-platform app that used 'native widgets' (at least a library that might already be installed) for every given platform, and w…

What’s the need? For better or worse, app bundles tend to be huge these days; there’s no obstacle to embedding a few megabytes’ worth of GUI libraries in your app bundle, or just statically linking them into your executable. Heck, a lot of apps embed a 120MB+ Electron framework; that’s pushing it, but Qt is “only” I’d love to see better cross-platform desktop apps. But I think the missing piece is for someone to write a good library that uses native widgets – not figuring out how to distribute that library.

For the record, I think Qt is reasonably good, but not native enough. On macOS, even QWidget often imitates native widgets (poorly) instead of using them; on top of that, QWidget as a whole has unfortunately been semi-deprecated, in favor of newer QML stuff that doesn’t even try to look native.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#50

Post by 7thaccount »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #30
7thaccount wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't think D had SQLite in stdlib. When I googled for it recently I just found some single contributor package and assumed it wasn't super well maintained.

That might be why honestly. https://dlang.org/phobos/etc_c_sqlite3.html For anybody's reference, it also has zlib, and an ODBC library.

Is there a page on how to use it? Thanks for the link!
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