4 ms·

I think a lot of the problems come from the incentives the Qt Company has. They get a lot of their revenue from big companies like car manufacturers with very s

I think a lot of the problems come from the incentives the Qt Company has. They get a lot of their revenue from big companies like car manufacturers with very specific requirements. That's why their QML examples always contain a car dashboard. Another part of their revenue is from people who are locked in to their license agreement. They are not putting enough resources into desktop development, widgets, or to make it a competitor to Electron, Flutter, and simliar tools. What Qt would need on the desktop is that they put Qt widgets on a new, modern, compositing based foundation (like Gtk did) in order to support transparency, animations etc. Then implement up to date themes for macOS and Windows (using foreign drawing if possible). The macOS theme is clearly outdated and still has blue buttons. Modern WinUI is not included at all. Yeah folk wisdom is that you cannot make a convincing native app this way, but you can get 95% there, and it will be much more native looking than any electron app. I don't see any of this happening, though.

baybal2 3y ago
[dead]
toyg 3y ago
The problem is that the desktop market is fundamentally dead from a commercial perspective. Without the embedding/automotive sector, Qt would have died more than 10 years ago; so it makes sense that they care for their actual source of revenue. You can have the best desktop tech in the world, if nobody wants to pay to do desktop development you're SOL. The real target should be phones. QT should have been what Electron became. To be fair, they tried with QT, but it was a day late and a dollar short - as web-like as it is, it's not real web. If you want one codebase for web and mobile, at the moment you'd never pick QML. What they could do is competing with Electron: provide a better, more featureful way to package advanced webapps. But it means stepping back a lot, and competing with free is hard. Or they could go back to QtWidgets, but it feels like that ship has sailed - apps these days don't even try to fit in with the phone's own native style.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Except that the folks using Electron don't care about C++, VSCode being the exception, being how much it has of it to work around performance issues.

baybal2 3y ago

[dead]

toyg 3y ago

The problem is that the desktop market is fundamentally dead from a commercial perspective. Without the embedding/automotive sector, Qt would have died more than 10 years ago; so it makes sense that they care for their actual source of revenue. You can have the best desktop tech in the world, if nobody wants to pay to do desktop development you're SOL. The real target should be phones. QT should have been what Electron became. To be fair, they tried with QT, but it was a day late and a dollar short - as web-like as it is, it's not real web. If you want one codebase for web and mobile, at the moment you'd never pick QML. What they could do is competing with Electron: provide a better, more featureful way to package advanced webapps. But it means stepping back a lot, and competing with free is hard. Or they could go back to QtWidgets, but it feels like that ship has sailed - apps these days don't even try to fit in with the phone's own native style.

pjmlp 3y ago
Except that the folks using Electron don't care about C++, VSCode being the exception, being how much it has of it to work around performance issues.