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I feel you. In fact after a decade of mostly C++ / Qt jobs, I've realized it's time to move away to other tech. More companies i worked with are avoiding Qt whe

I feel you. In fact after a decade of mostly C++ / Qt jobs, I've realized it's time to move away to other tech. More companies i worked with are avoiding Qt where they can. And even i was getting tired of creating the same QtQuick controls over and over again. Tbh Qt 5.15 is still plenty good for most embedded Linux use cases. Just that organizations i worked with are stuck with Qt 5.6 (last lgpl v2 version?) And it was a pain to keep backporting fixes to it. The 3D stack rewrites were also unavoidable when trying to write cross platform applications because the underlying graphics stack changed. OpenGL isn't getting much support from the drivers and ANGLE was a pain for them to integrate/maintain apparently. Qt 6 is available in LGPLv3 right? If you're already using 5.15, what would stop you from using Qt6? Interestingly, flutter seems to be taking off even in the embedded world where QtQuick used to work really well. You might want to consider that if you're averse to electron. (Eg. Flutter-pi).

joezydeco 5y ago
Qt 6 is available in LGPLv3 right? If you're already using 5.15, what would stop you from using Qt6? We're commercial distribution so we don't care about LGPLv3 for Qt. The problem is more about the previous contract we have in place with Qt that gives us some favorable terms. Qt wants us to drop that contract to go to Qt6, and we won't do it. Qt will get their customers on their subscription model eventually, and the rest will be learning how to write for embedded webkit. Like us. On a purely personal/professional angle I won't use Flutter. I have a blanket policy of refusing to use any Google-developed project for embedded devices, including Android.
- saidinesh5 5y ago
  Oh that sucks. Yeah Qt has gotten really aggressive with their licensing headaches. They broke so many of our CI scripts when they made it mandatory for you to log in to use their Qt installer even for online version. And yep. Relying on just Google can be a death sentence. I was hoping to use Android things for a quick demo last month only to find out that it is discontinued. What made me look at flutter was because companies like Sony are driving forward it's development on embedded space ( https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux ). Tbh I am still looking for something that was as nice as QtQuick on embedded devices, but with a permissive license. So other than electron, what options do you see moving forward? All i see is slint ( https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/ https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/ ).
  - joezydeco 5y ago
    I don't see many other options. For 1 slint/flutter/lvgl expert in the field I can find 100 experts in React or Node. I try to design systems where it's easier (management translation: cheaper) to hire developers instead of making it harder. Or finding someone that claims to be an expert in Qt or Flutter and the best they can do is a flashier version of the examples off of Github. Perhaps Flutter will survive Google and become something useful. But I really don't need to learn another language right now. Slint does look interesting, however. Kind of feels like QML in a number of ways. But, again, GPLV3 or commercial so it's going to be a lot of work to move.

joezydeco 5y ago

Qt 6 is available in LGPLv3 right? If you're already using 5.15, what would stop you from using Qt6? We're commercial distribution so we don't care about LGPLv3 for Qt. The problem is more about the previous contract we have in place with Qt that gives us some favorable terms. Qt wants us to drop that contract to go to Qt6, and we won't do it. Qt will get their customers on their subscription model eventually, and the rest will be learning how to write for embedded webkit. Like us. On a purely personal/professional angle I won't use Flutter. I have a blanket policy of refusing to use any Google-developed project for embedded devices, including Android.

saidinesh5 5y ago
Oh that sucks. Yeah Qt has gotten really aggressive with their licensing headaches. They broke so many of our CI scripts when they made it mandatory for you to log in to use their Qt installer even for online version. And yep. Relying on just Google can be a death sentence. I was hoping to use Android things for a quick demo last month only to find out that it is discontinued. What made me look at flutter was because companies like Sony are driving forward it's development on embedded space ( https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux ). Tbh I am still looking for something that was as nice as QtQuick on embedded devices, but with a permissive license. So other than electron, what options do you see moving forward? All i see is slint ( https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/ https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/ ).
- joezydeco 5y ago
  I don't see many other options. For 1 slint/flutter/lvgl expert in the field I can find 100 experts in React or Node. I try to design systems where it's easier (management translation: cheaper) to hire developers instead of making it harder. Or finding someone that claims to be an expert in Qt or Flutter and the best they can do is a flashier version of the examples off of Github. Perhaps Flutter will survive Google and become something useful. But I really don't need to learn another language right now. Slint does look interesting, however. Kind of feels like QML in a number of ways. But, again, GPLV3 or commercial so it's going to be a lot of work to move.