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A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

olafsw.de

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Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#71

Post by dev-il »

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…

Qt isn't known for "using every C++ feature" at all. Quite to the contrary, as far as C++ goes, Qt is stuck in the old times BEFORE modern C++. And it really shows in the architecture, memory management and syntax. In fact, lots of Qt's non-gui stuff is precisely about features that were missing in standard C++ at the time and later found their way there, leaving Qt with its old non-standard stuff (including containers, smart pointers, etc) and its raw pointers everywhere.

Making a wrapper for Qt is not really any more complicated by Qt being written in (old-style) C++ than if it had been written in C. In fact, lots of languages do have Qt wrappers. As for Qt being object oriented… well, while that might indeed have been a problem for a language that is not… all your examples (rust, go, dart, D, ...) are, so that's hardly the problem there. Also, as far as the declarative and reactive goes: Qt does do that as well, and way better than any browser-lib-based webrendering engine (including mozilla's)

The real pain point with Qt is with its licensing at least since Qt was bought by Digia.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#72

Post by KozmoNau7 »

lbeltrame wrote: post #44
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.

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).

KDE neon is downloadable as a LiveCD with an installer, it shows as "neon Linux" in the bootloader, and you use pkcon rather than apt as a package manager.

You could add the repos yourself to Ubuntu and have something very similar, but the way it is distributed, it is absolutely a distro.

It is certainly not the official, canonical KDE distro in any way, it is just a good distro with phenomenal KDE integration.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#73

Post by KozmoNau7 »

K0SM0S wrote: post #43
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.

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…

Neon is KDE over Ubuntu, with a completely stock KDE packaging rather than the slightly Ubuntu-modified KDE in Kubuntu.

So hardware support really should be identical.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#74

Post by dev-il »

Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death of Qt:

Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)…

… unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly traded as QT-COM on Nasdaq Helsinki) sees Qt as a direct revenue source to monetize to the maximum and developers as milk cows to maximally squeeze out as long as possible. And unlike Nokia, Digia's "Qt Company" does so in a quite unsustainable way. They enormously increased the prices of commercial licenses to a level that can only be qualified as extortion, and they do whatever possible to force developers out of LGPL and into Pay-to-Play:

they switched Qt's open source edition from LGPLv2.1 to LGPLv3… and they switched from LGPL to GPL or commercial only for most new modules, including QtQuick 3D.

The bottom line is: it's really going down the drain, and lots of developers of Qt-based programs and apps are drawn away and looking for something new. The need for a new modern and more liberally licensed cross-platform UI lib is bigger than ever.

Also, many devs are even switching out of Qt-based cross-platform development and back to separate codebases for OS-dependent native UI toolkits… which is kinda sad, though partly alleviated by some other factors (such as the similarities between Swift and Kotlin)

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#75

Post by pjmlp »

dev-il wrote: post #74

Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death of Qt: Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)… … unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly t…

FOSS developers leeching Qt developers will be the death of Qt.

It is hard to sustain a business out of donations and patreons, not everyone enjoys counting pennies every month.

Also Qt is doing pretty well, thanks to enterprises, which still seem to value paying for developer tooling.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#76

Post by jacobush »

ori_b wrote: post #53
toyg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt is massive , I doubt small communities would rush to integrate it and make it their job to maintain it all... I doubt anyone in OSS communities is seriously deterred from using Qt because of the LGPL. It’s just a very big and very complex project that requires a lot of manpower to “tame”.

Already happened: https://www.copperspice.com

But that is not BSD

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#77

Post by toyg »

Nokinside wrote: post #48
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…

That’s good, so why change the license now? Is it just greed?

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#78

Post by wruza »

pjmlp wrote: post #67
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…

They tried and learned that most FOSS don't want to pay for their tools, so they turned their focus to those that actually care to pay and have been doing quite alright.

Numerous frameworks didn’t even bother to turn to FOSS, and maybe they’re also doing alright. We cannot be sure though, cause no one knows their name.

The point of going foss, in my long-distance bystander observation, is to create an essential part of the market: skilled developers. Not to push your sales to everyone’s face, nor to whine that deals are too cheap. Foss folks will never pay, because they are not business for client, they are people for people (who work for business and sometimes make tech decisions based on a weekend experience).

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#79

Post by lmm »

pjmlp wrote: post #14
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

It all goes back to the early days of Gtk vs KDE, when Qt still had non-GPL compatible license. Red-Hat is the biggest employer of Gtk/GNOME devs, so... SuSE and Mandrake were historical the biggest ones that cared about KDE.

Right, but surely it's time to reconsider that. Qt has "caught up" on licensing, whereas to my eyes at least Gtk is still behind in terms of developer usability.

Re: A Better Qt Because of Open Source and KDE

#80

Post by PunksATawnyFill »

dev-il wrote: post #74

Sadly, I fear Digia (and its owned spin-off, the Qt Company) will be the death of Qt: Unlike Nokia, which bought Qt and opened it to a more liberal license (LGPLv2.1) because it saw it as a strategic platform basis to attract developers to its platform (that is, until the MS shill Elop was injected as Nokia's CEO and destroyed the company… and sold Qt off)… … unlike Nokia, the Digia-owned "Qt Company" (now publicly t…

Agreed. We looked at Qt, but the cost for the commercial version was a bad joke. And this is at a publicly-traded company with money.

The state of cross-platform development is truly and astonishingly pathetic in this day and age.

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