15 ms·

Qt 6.3

145 points by obdev 4y ago

jandeboevrie 4y ago
Remember kids, every week Qt changes their licensing model, every time less in favor of open source and more in favor of a second Yacht for the shareholders. I hate to recommend electron, but with the current closed direction they are going I to, better to stay away from Qt. The KDE foundation agreement is the only reason they still release Qt as open source, sadly. Qt for MCUs is completely closed for example.
- MarcellusDrum 4y ago
  > The KDE foundation agreement is the only reason they still release Qt as open source And the KDE foundation is the only thing putting QT on the map. They wouldn't dare break the agreement, unless they want to burn their company to the ground.
  - jraph 4y ago
    I'd say KDE and this agreement are why I would still consider using an open source version of Qt for a new project today. The whole KDE ecosystem will probably always need more stuff from Qt than me and I don't see KDE disappear overnight so I feel covered. A Qt app is so much lighter, faster and more enjoyable to use than any electron app. GTK still doesn't click for me as a programmer. Alternatives don't feel as functional as those three options.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      I like GTK, but the falloff in developer experience since 4.0 is really pathetic. Then there's a lot of petty changes I hate too, but that's a discussuon for another time. Word on the street is that KDE's maintainers plan to fork an older version of Qt for their desktop, but I guess only time will tell... Edit: The KDE bit is wrong, I still stand by the first portion though.
      - sho_hn 4y ago
        There's no such plan I am aware of.
  - Longhanks 4y ago
    There are at least some car manufacturers paying for Qt that do not care at all about this issue. On the other hand, I really doubt the open source community is responsible for a large chunk of the Qt company's income. Sure, breaking the agreement would further hurt their image in the open source community, but I doubt it would have a large impact on the company's future.
    - sho_hn 4y ago
      > There are at least some car manufacturers paying for Qt that do not care at all about this issue. I work for a car company using Qt. The open source community around Qt is a significant contributor to the talent pool we hire from (myself included), and it is also a regular contributor to (and indirectly/broadly, the inspiration for) integration-related Qt modules (e.g. QtWayland) we like. Its health is important.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    What puts Qt on the map are the companies keep paying their developers.
    - MarcellusDrum 4y ago
      But why would your average developer even bother learning about QT if not because of its popularity in the open source community? The companies that pay for QT will have a hard time finding talent if QT wasn't popular due to its open source nature.
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        For the same reasons people actually pay for their worktools, and specific software or cloud certifications. Plus the GPL version is good enough for the said developer to learn Qt if it happens to be out of cash.
- enriquto 4y ago
  > every week Qt changes their licensing model, every time less in favor of open source Where can we learn about this? As far as it seems, qt is still, as always, distributed under the LGPL; which is as "open source" as it gets. The main site of qt even lists explicitly the Four Freedoms of the FSF : https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations
  - ttybird2 4y ago
    Probably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166451
  - gmueckl 4y ago
    They can't just stop licensing the core of Qt under GPL or LGPL (I forget which) due to an old agreement between Trolltech and KDE e.V. that states (roughly) that if there are no more OSS releases of Qt for more than a year, the last public release gets automatically relicensed under something more liberal (BSD or MIT). But the Qt Company has tried to make using the open source releases more and more inconvenient: licensing terms for the commercial version that are not at all forthcoming to OSS-to-commercial converts (implying that you need to pay for commercial licenses from the start), more limited access to precompiled binaries and registration obligations when you want to use the official Qt installer. That behavior seems to say that the company is bound by an agreement that they honor only reluctantly.
    - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
      To put that another way then: they seem to feel they have some freedom to decide which components should be covered by the KDE agreement. (To put a finer point on the specifics you mentioned: I believe they once had a policy of making the QML-to-C++ compiler available only to commercial customers, and not to FOSS users, treating it as something distinct from the 'core of Qt'. They later changed their minds on this. [0][1]) Presumably they could start work on a whole new toolkit, call it something other than Qt, and be free of the KDE agreement. This would no doubt be much more work than a typical major Qt release, but they do presumably have the option. [0] https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-in-qt https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-i... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translated-into-native-code-at-the-compilation-time-or-is-it-interpreted/23785650#comment110347258_23785650 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translate...
- captn3m0 4y ago
  We were trying to document EoL dates for Qt at endoflife.date/qt and it was made needlessly difficult by Qt patches being technically open-source via KDE patches. The whole thing felt so fragile.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Their business size doesn't really look THAT much Yacht-friendly though? $121M in revenue, $28M operating income with 445 employees[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company It doesn't look like they are in the take over the world then monetise business, more like make a niche product and charge for it business. Then kind of makes sense to charge enterprise level license fees and operate with enterprisey licences and not bother too much with making the world a better place?
- api 4y ago
  Building a cross-platform UI with support for theming, layouts, accessibility, high-DPI, internationalization, and lots of targets is brutally soul-crushingly hard. It involves a ton of the sort of work that is absolutely not fun and that therefore programmers have to be paid to do. How would you propose funding such a thing? Or would you like to volunteer to spend every waking moment of your life fixing bugs like "your layout manager misaligns buttons by 1-2 pixels but only on my system when the moon is full or on 64-bit CPUs in the Northern hemisphere while using Arabic languages." That's what working with UI/UX is like, especially if you support... well... really anything other than native macOS on systems sold by Apple in the last 4 years only. It's why FOSS has never crossed over into the mainstream in any meaningful way. Making software is fun. Making it polished, pretty, and usable is a house of pain. Doing that across platforms is a journey into the lower circles of hell. Electron is heavily subsidized by Google (and others) via Chromium. It's also a much more bloated user-unfriendly resource hog than Qt. But we use it because paying for quality software is unthinkable. Now off to Starbucks to buy another $12 coffee drink.
  - _jordan 4y ago
    That's definitely a good point. But it's also sort of self-fulfilling: those layout misalignments and RTL font issues you mentioned become less of an issue as more people embrace Qt. Chrome presumably has figured it out simply because so many people are reliant on it working. If more people embraced Qt, they'd fix the hard parts as they would have more investment.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Gtk+ was originally picked up to face Qt back in the Linux pre-historic days. We all know how well those community contributions turned out.
- tomc1985 4y ago
  Ugh, literally anything but Electron
  - judge2020 4y ago
    Internet explorer WebView? :)
    - tomc1985 4y ago
      Arguably better
    - ______-_-______ 4y ago
      Say what you will, but an IE webview loads instantly and uses 3MB of RAM.
      - dTal 4y ago
        Not on Linux it doesn't!
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Remember kids, father and mamma have to put bread on the table somehow.
eql5 4y ago
Shameless plug to this new project (uses Lisp): https://gitlab.com/eql/lqml https://gitlab.com/eql/lqml
samsaga2 4y ago
What is Qt Language Server? Can I use it to have qml autocompletion in my emacs lsp-mode?
- zxspectrum1982 4y ago
  Yes, since this release (Qt 6.3) https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-68406 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-68406
npigrounet 4y ago
Qt is too much expensive and closed-source.
- ttybird2 4y ago
  This might have been true 23 years ago but since then it became free software.
  - stevemk14ebr 4y ago
    then it went un-free again...
    - red_trumpet 4y ago
      It's source code is still released under LGPL though.
    - jcelerier 4y ago
      That looks extremely unfree, yes: https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/LICENSE.LGPL3 https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/LICENSE.LGPL3
  - npigrounet 4y ago
    Just look at the prices on their website.
    - sigzero 4y ago
      That is only if you want to use it commercially.
      - Kelteseth 4y ago
        That's only if you won't/can't comply with the LGPLv3
    - zxspectrum1982 4y ago
      Have you ever done the math on what developer time costs? Even if Qt looks very expensive, it is cheap when you take that into account (not to speak of the savings in Qt and post-release bugfixes).
Perolan2 4y ago
Many complaints are around about how QT isn’t FOSS, licensing is costly, etc. is everyone happy with its performance as a product and framework, though? We purchased a small business license for QT 5 and I’ve never hated a framework more. It was clunky, resource consuming, surprisingly challenging to build in the way we needed, difficult to work with, etc. No engineer wanted to touch the gui codebase until we moved off of it. Most of the use cases where I see people sing it’s praises are the python framework rather than the C++ one, but are we really the only people who had this negative of an experience?
- lultimouomo 4y ago
  I've used Qt for several desktop apps, both using Widgets and QML; I never used the python bindings, always used the C++ libraries directly. Writing GUIs is not a ton of fun for me (whether with Qt on desktop, native development on iOS and Android, or Flutter for mobile/desktop), but I wouldn't say Qt Widgets are worse than other stuff. I'd say it's definitely better that Android and iOS were a few years ago, before reactive programming became widespread. I didn't have a good experience with QML; I'd call it at most not great, not terrible. I've been using Flutter lately for a desktop app and the GUI part is more pleasant to write, for me (mainly because of the general "immediate mode/react" feel); if the app had a reasonably complex business logic I wouldn't want to write it in Dart though.
  - ZeroCool2u 4y ago
    "... if the app had a reasonably complex business logic I wouldn't want to write it in Dart though." I'm surprised by this as I've been working on a pure Dart library lately and really enjoyed it. Anything in particular you dislike?
    - grumpyprole 4y ago
      Not the OP, but Dart, although basically a 90's Java clone, is still superficially different enough that it needs to be learnt - so where's the payoff? It doesn't fix most of Java's issues: pervasive mutability, boilerplate, a kingdom of nouns, Tony Hoare's billion dollar mistake etc. There are many better Java++ languages out there; and this includes the roadmap for Java itself (pattern matching, sealed classes, data classes, fibers etc).
54674646754 4y ago
Am I crazy to think Gtk4 is now a viable cross-platform alternative to Qt? The Gtk devs have at least given the impression that they want to support other platforms (for example, this talk: youtube.com/watch?v=FB2Y2Wk6FKE or this post: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/is-gtk-4-cross-platform/6144/2 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/is-gtk-4-cross-platform/6144/2). And getting it up and running on Windows with MSYS was pretty easy. It also uses GPU-accelerated rendering if available.
- dantondwa 4y ago
  I've been thinking the same. Also, with libadwaita, it looks quite good by default, and the design is more or less the same as Windows 11 or macOS.
- zxspectrum1982 4y ago
  Yes, you are crazy. Gtk+ has always been a joke compared to Qt, moreso Gtk4 vs Qt6.
- api 4y ago
  Is accessibility mature across platforms? If not, then nope. Accessibility is the hill virtually every FOSS UI cross-platform toolkit dies on.
  - schaefer 4y ago
    So you're not even going to do enough homework to see if you've got anything to be upset about here? You're just going to shout your requirements into the wind?
  - mwcampbell 4y ago
    As far as I can tell, GTK 4 is still only accessible on free Unixes, via AT-SPI. There doesn't seem to be any progress in making it accessible on Windows or Mac.
- ducktective 4y ago
  > Am I crazy to think Gtk4 is now a viable cross-platform alternative to Qt? Dream solution is having a nix flake setup with correct compiler selection and switches for Windows/Linux/Mac and Android.
mistrial9 4y ago
Honestly I am confused by the reactions here -- everyone wants FREE and GREAT and also calls the company management bad names? Some say that danger is not in the path forward, but instead the arrows shot in the back from behind (!) I see that here.. People that have only written mobile, ever, complaining that mobile is not what they expected; people want cross-platform, pixel perfect AND free-no-money and somehow this company employees people ? and etcetera .. suffocating, petty really..
- tored 4y ago
  I agree with that is very dominant culture among programmers that they want things for "free" and not pay anything to everyone that have worked hard on it. Myself I have zero problems paying for software if it is good. My problem with Qt is that it isn't worth my money.
- ThrashBeard 4y ago
  I've noticed that a few times with people pretending to care about open source but in reality they care mostly about the free as in free beer part. Not that long ago there was an announcement by GitHub where they talked about adding a feature for developers to monetize their projects. I don't remember what it was exactly but I think it was that you could make the releases only available to people who paid and some people were outraged. This isn't even a new thing, people were selling copies of OSS for decades. And it's not only about money. There's too much shitting on OSS devs for minor problems. Some project doesn't get updated every day and people just start blasting the dev even though they got the software for free with no strings attached. I'm not saying you can't criticize but personally I'm a lot more lenient on something I got completely for free, no limits, no contracts.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  > everyone wants FREE and GREAT and also calls the company management bad names? These two are not mutually exclusive, one can want a good FLOSS library and at the same time dislike the tactics of company that is currently developing said FLOSS library.
  - 4y ago
butz 4y ago
Is GNOME/Wayland compatibility any better? Qt5 applications running in Wayland mode (as opposed to xcb fallback) has issues with window decorator, resulting in windows with missing shadows and other minor differences, as compared to GTK applications.
- ZeroCool2u 4y ago
  In the full release notes here[1] you can CTRL-F for wayland. You'll find 51 references, so definitely some fixes. [1]: https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtreleasenotes.git/about/qt/6.3.0/release-note.md https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtreleasenotes.git/about/qt/6.3.0...
Alir3z4 4y ago
Qt is the reason I started doing desktop cross platform application development several years ago. Not doing anything new in recent years but Qt is definitely a joy to work with. From MVC on data management in the widgets, networking, UI handling and tons of customization. The Qt Creator IDE was the fastest IDE I've worked with and very helpful with Qt Designer integrated. Dealing with system icons in Linux or i18n, tooling, compilation and building and so many other really complex stuff is pretty damn easy with Qt. Although I've used Qt/C++ and never the Python binding. Thanks for all the hard work and amazing people behind it.
- Barrin92 4y ago
  I recently started a hobby project because I was bored and built an Everything clone with Qt for Python as it doesn't run on linux and I was very surprised how straight forward and performant it is. Despite dealing with a lot of tabular data and Python it seems as fast as C++. Can't claim to understand the magic under the hood but it's very solid.
  - onphonenow 4y ago
    Can you describe your tooling for Qt with Python development? I've tried to get started a few times but there were some licensing trip ups etc and a lot of different tools on the QT website. Can you develop a normal (non open source) apps using Qt/Python? For line of business apps users are not supposed to have access to source code etc. Also, do you have to use QML, did you use QML. At first glance that wasn't so appealing.
    - Barrin92 4y ago
      for the python environment I use poetry which I think works well (https://python-poetry.org/ https://python-poetry.org/). As for the licensing (and someone correct me if this is wrong), you have the option to go with PyQt which is GPL licensed and will require you to open source your code, if you go with PySide which is LGPL licensed you do not (unless you make modifications to the Qt code itself which I suppose you're not). So the latter is the better option if you just want to distribute an app. You don't need to use Qml at all and can use QtWidgets instead which is just their traditional toolkit, or you can combine both. I tried Qml for parts of the UI and it's fairly straight forward. I think QtCreator supports python now so if you want a complete IDE with graphical tools that works well, I just used my normal editor.
jonpalmisc 4y ago
It’s easy to argue that all cross platform C++ GUI libraries suck, but Qt definitely sucks the least. Yes, sometimes it can be awkward to use, and yes, there are longstanding bugs in Qt itself that remain unfixed. In my opinion, it is still the best C++ GUI library out there. For basic to intermediate GUI apps, it just works, and for advanced use cases, with some effort you can make it do whatever you need. I write Qt software now and I’d be happy to keep doing so.
criddell 4y ago
I think I use two Qt apps regularly and both are related to my 3d printer. The slicer and CAD software. The slicer is Cura and it works great and feels good to use. It's a little slow to load, but once it's loaded it's a joy to use. The CAD software is Fusion 360. Functionally, it does lots of great stuff, but it too is slow to load and, unlike Cura, it feels terrible to use. Of all the software I use, Fusion 360 is the worst. How has Autodesk managed to write a Qt app that feels this bad?
- dekhn 4y ago
  Fusion 360 is Qt? I didn't know. BTW, I use Fusion 360 for power modelling (hundreds of thousands of triangles) and while it's slow, it deals with nearly every problem I have well. It looks like most of the underlying compute is single-threaded and often blocks the UI.
  - criddell 4y ago
    Fusion 360's kernel is ShapeManager which is also used by Autocad and Inventor and is a fork of ACIS, the kernel used by SolidWorks.
- cprecioso 4y ago
  IIRC Fusion 360's workload is mainly run in a browser-ish frame, Qt only provides the window to go around it -- similar to Electron.
  - criddell 4y ago
    That makes some sense but I don't think Qt is just the frame. TWhy use Qt if all you need is a frame window? Maybe they are drawing the Qt widgets on a browser canvas or something. It does feel like a shitty Electron app though. It's really too bad because functionally it's great, it's just a terrible UX. I think it makes Qt look bad too.
tomatowurst 4y ago
I am just starting my journey with PyQt6 coming from React/Redux madness. I have a slew of questions if you don't mind me asking to more experienced PyQT developers on HN: How does the development experience compare to React/Redux? Is there more or less or about same amount of work involved? Learning curve? What is the general timeline of QT -> PyQT downstream of features like? ex) quick compiler in QT 6.3 Have you built a major application with PyQT? What about QML? How do you deal with application state like Redux in PyQT? Are there noticeable performance gains and efficient resource uses vs Electron? What advice do you have for someone like me venturing into PyQT? I've used Python in backend only so far. Have you shipped with the fman build tool from mherrmann? How has the process been like? Is there a browser or "WebView" component in PyQT6? Much thanks!
ngcc_hk 4y ago
Just submit one related CL Repl with qt support https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006097 Qt is great for its cross platform support. This is a demo of this capability, not exactly pure qt. Qml. Ecl etc.
umen 4y ago
What about wxwidgets can its be competitor?
- zxspectrum1982 4y ago
  A joke. Feature and maturity-wise, Qt is unbeatable.
guilhas 4y ago
Great UI framework, one of The best. And cross platform Some people are wary of the license, but if your project is fully open source you'll have no problem There is still some confusion how best open source developers make a living, some are successful, and some get frustrated. Farming users data(Chrome), donations, dual license, paid addons... Congrats to Qt for doing their best in delivering a sustained high quality open source product

145 points by obdev 4y ago

Remember kids, every week Qt changes their licensing model, every time less in favor of open source and more in favor of a second Yacht for the shareholders. I hate to recommend electron, but with the current closed direction they are going I to, better to stay away from Qt. The KDE foundation agreement is the only reason they still release Qt as open source, sadly. Qt for MCUs is completely closed for example.

MarcellusDrum 4y ago
> The KDE foundation agreement is the only reason they still release Qt as open source And the KDE foundation is the only thing putting QT on the map. They wouldn't dare break the agreement, unless they want to burn their company to the ground.
- jraph 4y ago
  I'd say KDE and this agreement are why I would still consider using an open source version of Qt for a new project today. The whole KDE ecosystem will probably always need more stuff from Qt than me and I don't see KDE disappear overnight so I feel covered. A Qt app is so much lighter, faster and more enjoyable to use than any electron app. GTK still doesn't click for me as a programmer. Alternatives don't feel as functional as those three options.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I like GTK, but the falloff in developer experience since 4.0 is really pathetic. Then there's a lot of petty changes I hate too, but that's a discussuon for another time. Word on the street is that KDE's maintainers plan to fork an older version of Qt for their desktop, but I guess only time will tell... Edit: The KDE bit is wrong, I still stand by the first portion though.
    - sho_hn 4y ago
      There's no such plan I am aware of.
- Longhanks 4y ago
  There are at least some car manufacturers paying for Qt that do not care at all about this issue. On the other hand, I really doubt the open source community is responsible for a large chunk of the Qt company's income. Sure, breaking the agreement would further hurt their image in the open source community, but I doubt it would have a large impact on the company's future.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    > There are at least some car manufacturers paying for Qt that do not care at all about this issue. I work for a car company using Qt. The open source community around Qt is a significant contributor to the talent pool we hire from (myself included), and it is also a regular contributor to (and indirectly/broadly, the inspiration for) integration-related Qt modules (e.g. QtWayland) we like. Its health is important.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  What puts Qt on the map are the companies keep paying their developers.
  - MarcellusDrum 4y ago
    But why would your average developer even bother learning about QT if not because of its popularity in the open source community? The companies that pay for QT will have a hard time finding talent if QT wasn't popular due to its open source nature.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      For the same reasons people actually pay for their worktools, and specific software or cloud certifications. Plus the GPL version is good enough for the said developer to learn Qt if it happens to be out of cash.
enriquto 4y ago
> every week Qt changes their licensing model, every time less in favor of open source Where can we learn about this? As far as it seems, qt is still, as always, distributed under the LGPL; which is as "open source" as it gets. The main site of qt even lists explicitly the Four Freedoms of the FSF : https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations https://www.qt.io/licensing/open-source-lgpl-obligations
- ttybird2 4y ago
  Probably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22166451
- gmueckl 4y ago
  They can't just stop licensing the core of Qt under GPL or LGPL (I forget which) due to an old agreement between Trolltech and KDE e.V. that states (roughly) that if there are no more OSS releases of Qt for more than a year, the last public release gets automatically relicensed under something more liberal (BSD or MIT). But the Qt Company has tried to make using the open source releases more and more inconvenient: licensing terms for the commercial version that are not at all forthcoming to OSS-to-commercial converts (implying that you need to pay for commercial licenses from the start), more limited access to precompiled binaries and registration obligations when you want to use the official Qt installer. That behavior seems to say that the company is bound by an agreement that they honor only reluctantly.
  - MaxBarraclough 4y ago
    To put that another way then: they seem to feel they have some freedom to decide which components should be covered by the KDE agreement. (To put a finer point on the specifics you mentioned: I believe they once had a policy of making the QML-to-C++ compiler available only to commercial customers, and not to FOSS users, treating it as something distinct from the 'core of Qt'. They later changed their minds on this. [0][1]) Presumably they could start work on a whole new toolkit, call it something other than Qt, and be free of the KDE agreement. This would no doubt be much more work than a typical major Qt release, but they do presumably have the option. [0] https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-in-qt https://www.qt.io/blog/the-new-qt-quick-compiler-is-coming-i... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translated-into-native-code-at-the-compilation-time-or-is-it-interpreted/23785650#comment110347258_23785650 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translate...
captn3m0 4y ago
We were trying to document EoL dates for Qt at endoflife.date/qt and it was made needlessly difficult by Qt patches being technically open-source via KDE patches. The whole thing felt so fragile.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mrtksn 4y ago
Their business size doesn't really look THAT much Yacht-friendly though? $121M in revenue, $28M operating income with 445 employees[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Qt_Company It doesn't look like they are in the take over the world then monetise business, more like make a niche product and charge for it business. Then kind of makes sense to charge enterprise level license fees and operate with enterprisey licences and not bother too much with making the world a better place?
api 4y ago
Building a cross-platform UI with support for theming, layouts, accessibility, high-DPI, internationalization, and lots of targets is brutally soul-crushingly hard. It involves a ton of the sort of work that is absolutely not fun and that therefore programmers have to be paid to do. How would you propose funding such a thing? Or would you like to volunteer to spend every waking moment of your life fixing bugs like "your layout manager misaligns buttons by 1-2 pixels but only on my system when the moon is full or on 64-bit CPUs in the Northern hemisphere while using Arabic languages." That's what working with UI/UX is like, especially if you support... well... really anything other than native macOS on systems sold by Apple in the last 4 years only. It's why FOSS has never crossed over into the mainstream in any meaningful way. Making software is fun. Making it polished, pretty, and usable is a house of pain. Doing that across platforms is a journey into the lower circles of hell. Electron is heavily subsidized by Google (and others) via Chromium. It's also a much more bloated user-unfriendly resource hog than Qt. But we use it because paying for quality software is unthinkable. Now off to Starbucks to buy another $12 coffee drink.
- _jordan 4y ago
  That's definitely a good point. But it's also sort of self-fulfilling: those layout misalignments and RTL font issues you mentioned become less of an issue as more people embrace Qt. Chrome presumably has figured it out simply because so many people are reliant on it working. If more people embraced Qt, they'd fix the hard parts as they would have more investment.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Gtk+ was originally picked up to face Qt back in the Linux pre-historic days. We all know how well those community contributions turned out.
tomc1985 4y ago
Ugh, literally anything but Electron
- judge2020 4y ago
  Internet explorer WebView? :)
  - tomc1985 4y ago
    Arguably better
  - ______-_-______ 4y ago
    Say what you will, but an IE webview loads instantly and uses 3MB of RAM.
    - dTal 4y ago
      Not on Linux it doesn't!
pjmlp 4y ago
Remember kids, father and mamma have to put bread on the table somehow.

eql5 4y ago

Shameless plug to this new project (uses Lisp): https://gitlab.com/eql/lqml https://gitlab.com/eql/lqml

samsaga2 4y ago

What is Qt Language Server? Can I use it to have qml autocompletion in my emacs lsp-mode?

zxspectrum1982 4y ago
Yes, since this release (Qt 6.3) https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-68406 https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-68406

npigrounet 4y ago

Qt is too much expensive and closed-source.

ttybird2 4y ago
This might have been true 23 years ago but since then it became free software.
- stevemk14ebr 4y ago
  then it went un-free again...
  - red_trumpet 4y ago
    It's source code is still released under LGPL though.
  - jcelerier 4y ago
    That looks extremely unfree, yes: https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/LICENSE.LGPL3 https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/LICENSE.LGPL3
- npigrounet 4y ago
  Just look at the prices on their website.
  - sigzero 4y ago
    That is only if you want to use it commercially.
    - Kelteseth 4y ago
      That's only if you won't/can't comply with the LGPLv3
  - zxspectrum1982 4y ago
    Have you ever done the math on what developer time costs? Even if Qt looks very expensive, it is cheap when you take that into account (not to speak of the savings in Qt and post-release bugfixes).

Perolan2 4y ago

Many complaints are around about how QT isn’t FOSS, licensing is costly, etc. is everyone happy with its performance as a product and framework, though? We purchased a small business license for QT 5 and I’ve never hated a framework more. It was clunky, resource consuming, surprisingly challenging to build in the way we needed, difficult to work with, etc. No engineer wanted to touch the gui codebase until we moved off of it. Most of the use cases where I see people sing it’s praises are the python framework rather than the C++ one, but are we really the only people who had this negative of an experience?

lultimouomo 4y ago
I've used Qt for several desktop apps, both using Widgets and QML; I never used the python bindings, always used the C++ libraries directly. Writing GUIs is not a ton of fun for me (whether with Qt on desktop, native development on iOS and Android, or Flutter for mobile/desktop), but I wouldn't say Qt Widgets are worse than other stuff. I'd say it's definitely better that Android and iOS were a few years ago, before reactive programming became widespread. I didn't have a good experience with QML; I'd call it at most not great, not terrible. I've been using Flutter lately for a desktop app and the GUI part is more pleasant to write, for me (mainly because of the general "immediate mode/react" feel); if the app had a reasonably complex business logic I wouldn't want to write it in Dart though.
- ZeroCool2u 4y ago
  "... if the app had a reasonably complex business logic I wouldn't want to write it in Dart though." I'm surprised by this as I've been working on a pure Dart library lately and really enjoyed it. Anything in particular you dislike?
  - grumpyprole 4y ago
    Not the OP, but Dart, although basically a 90's Java clone, is still superficially different enough that it needs to be learnt - so where's the payoff? It doesn't fix most of Java's issues: pervasive mutability, boilerplate, a kingdom of nouns, Tony Hoare's billion dollar mistake etc. There are many better Java++ languages out there; and this includes the roadmap for Java itself (pattern matching, sealed classes, data classes, fibers etc).

54674646754 4y ago

Am I crazy to think Gtk4 is now a viable cross-platform alternative to Qt? The Gtk devs have at least given the impression that they want to support other platforms (for example, this talk: youtube.com/watch?v=FB2Y2Wk6FKE or this post: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/is-gtk-4-cross-platform/6144/2 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/is-gtk-4-cross-platform/6144/2). And getting it up and running on Windows with MSYS was pretty easy. It also uses GPU-accelerated rendering if available.

dantondwa 4y ago
I've been thinking the same. Also, with libadwaita, it looks quite good by default, and the design is more or less the same as Windows 11 or macOS.
zxspectrum1982 4y ago
Yes, you are crazy. Gtk+ has always been a joke compared to Qt, moreso Gtk4 vs Qt6.
api 4y ago
Is accessibility mature across platforms? If not, then nope. Accessibility is the hill virtually every FOSS UI cross-platform toolkit dies on.
- schaefer 4y ago
  So you're not even going to do enough homework to see if you've got anything to be upset about here? You're just going to shout your requirements into the wind?
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  As far as I can tell, GTK 4 is still only accessible on free Unixes, via AT-SPI. There doesn't seem to be any progress in making it accessible on Windows or Mac.
ducktective 4y ago
> Am I crazy to think Gtk4 is now a viable cross-platform alternative to Qt? Dream solution is having a nix flake setup with correct compiler selection and switches for Windows/Linux/Mac and Android.

mistrial9 4y ago

Honestly I am confused by the reactions here -- everyone wants FREE and GREAT and also calls the company management bad names? Some say that danger is not in the path forward, but instead the arrows shot in the back from behind (!) I see that here.. People that have only written mobile, ever, complaining that mobile is not what they expected; people want cross-platform, pixel perfect AND free-no-money and somehow this company employees people ? and etcetera .. suffocating, petty really..

tored 4y ago
I agree with that is very dominant culture among programmers that they want things for "free" and not pay anything to everyone that have worked hard on it. Myself I have zero problems paying for software if it is good. My problem with Qt is that it isn't worth my money.
ThrashBeard 4y ago
I've noticed that a few times with people pretending to care about open source but in reality they care mostly about the free as in free beer part. Not that long ago there was an announcement by GitHub where they talked about adding a feature for developers to monetize their projects. I don't remember what it was exactly but I think it was that you could make the releases only available to people who paid and some people were outraged. This isn't even a new thing, people were selling copies of OSS for decades. And it's not only about money. There's too much shitting on OSS devs for minor problems. Some project doesn't get updated every day and people just start blasting the dev even though they got the software for free with no strings attached. I'm not saying you can't criticize but personally I'm a lot more lenient on something I got completely for free, no limits, no contracts.
badsectoracula 4y ago
> everyone wants FREE and GREAT and also calls the company management bad names? These two are not mutually exclusive, one can want a good FLOSS library and at the same time dislike the tactics of company that is currently developing said FLOSS library.
- 4y ago

butz 4y ago

Is GNOME/Wayland compatibility any better? Qt5 applications running in Wayland mode (as opposed to xcb fallback) has issues with window decorator, resulting in windows with missing shadows and other minor differences, as compared to GTK applications.

ZeroCool2u 4y ago
In the full release notes here[1] you can CTRL-F for wayland. You'll find 51 references, so definitely some fixes. [1]: https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtreleasenotes.git/about/qt/6.3.0/release-note.md https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtreleasenotes.git/about/qt/6.3.0...

Alir3z4 4y ago

Qt is the reason I started doing desktop cross platform application development several years ago. Not doing anything new in recent years but Qt is definitely a joy to work with. From MVC on data management in the widgets, networking, UI handling and tons of customization. The Qt Creator IDE was the fastest IDE I've worked with and very helpful with Qt Designer integrated. Dealing with system icons in Linux or i18n, tooling, compilation and building and so many other really complex stuff is pretty damn easy with Qt. Although I've used Qt/C++ and never the Python binding. Thanks for all the hard work and amazing people behind it.

Barrin92 4y ago
I recently started a hobby project because I was bored and built an Everything clone with Qt for Python as it doesn't run on linux and I was very surprised how straight forward and performant it is. Despite dealing with a lot of tabular data and Python it seems as fast as C++. Can't claim to understand the magic under the hood but it's very solid.
- onphonenow 4y ago
  Can you describe your tooling for Qt with Python development? I've tried to get started a few times but there were some licensing trip ups etc and a lot of different tools on the QT website. Can you develop a normal (non open source) apps using Qt/Python? For line of business apps users are not supposed to have access to source code etc. Also, do you have to use QML, did you use QML. At first glance that wasn't so appealing.
  - Barrin92 4y ago
    for the python environment I use poetry which I think works well (https://python-poetry.org/ https://python-poetry.org/). As for the licensing (and someone correct me if this is wrong), you have the option to go with PyQt which is GPL licensed and will require you to open source your code, if you go with PySide which is LGPL licensed you do not (unless you make modifications to the Qt code itself which I suppose you're not). So the latter is the better option if you just want to distribute an app. You don't need to use Qml at all and can use QtWidgets instead which is just their traditional toolkit, or you can combine both. I tried Qml for parts of the UI and it's fairly straight forward. I think QtCreator supports python now so if you want a complete IDE with graphical tools that works well, I just used my normal editor.

jonpalmisc 4y ago

It’s easy to argue that all cross platform C++ GUI libraries suck, but Qt definitely sucks the least. Yes, sometimes it can be awkward to use, and yes, there are longstanding bugs in Qt itself that remain unfixed. In my opinion, it is still the best C++ GUI library out there. For basic to intermediate GUI apps, it just works, and for advanced use cases, with some effort you can make it do whatever you need. I write Qt software now and I’d be happy to keep doing so.

criddell 4y ago

I think I use two Qt apps regularly and both are related to my 3d printer. The slicer and CAD software. The slicer is Cura and it works great and feels good to use. It's a little slow to load, but once it's loaded it's a joy to use. The CAD software is Fusion 360. Functionally, it does lots of great stuff, but it too is slow to load and, unlike Cura, it feels terrible to use. Of all the software I use, Fusion 360 is the worst. How has Autodesk managed to write a Qt app that feels this bad?

dekhn 4y ago
Fusion 360 is Qt? I didn't know. BTW, I use Fusion 360 for power modelling (hundreds of thousands of triangles) and while it's slow, it deals with nearly every problem I have well. It looks like most of the underlying compute is single-threaded and often blocks the UI.
- criddell 4y ago
  Fusion 360's kernel is ShapeManager which is also used by Autocad and Inventor and is a fork of ACIS, the kernel used by SolidWorks.
cprecioso 4y ago
IIRC Fusion 360's workload is mainly run in a browser-ish frame, Qt only provides the window to go around it -- similar to Electron.
- criddell 4y ago
  That makes some sense but I don't think Qt is just the frame. TWhy use Qt if all you need is a frame window? Maybe they are drawing the Qt widgets on a browser canvas or something. It does feel like a shitty Electron app though. It's really too bad because functionally it's great, it's just a terrible UX. I think it makes Qt look bad too.

tomatowurst 4y ago

I am just starting my journey with PyQt6 coming from React/Redux madness. I have a slew of questions if you don't mind me asking to more experienced PyQT developers on HN: How does the development experience compare to React/Redux? Is there more or less or about same amount of work involved? Learning curve? What is the general timeline of QT -> PyQT downstream of features like? ex) quick compiler in QT 6.3 Have you built a major application with PyQT? What about QML? How do you deal with application state like Redux in PyQT? Are there noticeable performance gains and efficient resource uses vs Electron? What advice do you have for someone like me venturing into PyQT? I've used Python in backend only so far. Have you shipped with the fman build tool from mherrmann? How has the process been like? Is there a browser or "WebView" component in PyQT6? Much thanks!

ngcc_hk 4y ago

Just submit one related CL Repl with qt support https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31006097 Qt is great for its cross platform support. This is a demo of this capability, not exactly pure qt. Qml. Ecl etc.

umen 4y ago

What about wxwidgets can its be competitor?

zxspectrum1982 4y ago
A joke. Feature and maturity-wise, Qt is unbeatable.

guilhas 4y ago

Great UI framework, one of The best. And cross platform Some people are wary of the license, but if your project is fully open source you'll have no problem There is still some confusion how best open source developers make a living, some are successful, and some get frustrated. Farming users data(Chrome), donations, dual license, paid addons... Congrats to Qt for doing their best in delivering a sustained high quality open source product