7 ms·

The KDE Free Qt Foundation: 25 Years of Celebration

161 points by LorenDB 3y ago

joeythedolphin 3y ago
After 20 years and a hundred dozen frameworks, Qt's C++ widget SDK is still the best designed API I have worked with. I haven't worked with it in years, but it was a great time.
mikae1 3y ago
KDE Plasma made getting back to desktop Linux after 15 years of macOS an easy task. Despite GNOME often being described as closer to macOS and Plasma closer to Windows I've found that no DE comes close to the configurability and polish that Plasma has. Congratulations!
- _benj 3y ago
  Same experience here. I was getting fed up with every new gnome release taking away more features and at the same time was missing the niceties of macOS. Decided to give plasma a try and it quickly turn into my daily driver. No need for gnome tweaks, or even confit files, right-click whatever I want to change and there’s a setting to change it!
  - edbaskerville 3y ago
    And here! I switched from Mac to a Framework with Ubuntu/GNOME six months ago. Switched to Fedora/KDE Plasma this week and it's been so much better--everything is so much more discoverable. That said, Dolphin just got a bug where it crashes during thumbnail generation, and I'm seeing artifacts in Wayland with fractional scaling, but the KDE bug system is very visible and easy to navigate, so that I'm pretty confident these will be fixed soon. (I did know what I was getting into when I left Apple for the Wild West.)
    - mikae1 3y ago
      PCManFM-Qt is highly recommended. Looks and feels right at home in Plasma and is a little less quirky than Dolphin.
    - _benj 3y ago
      I've been using X11 and everything has been flawless.
      - edbaskerville 3y ago
        As far as I can tell there's no way to get proper pinch-to-zoom in Xorg, so I'm going with Wayland for now. It is totally insane that this is a thing for a user to think about.
- asdlfkjasdlfjkh 3y ago
  gnome is not closer to macOS. sadly gnome is coopted into making bad decisions under the guise of copying macOS. As soon as the "designers" got more funding than the coding contributors, the whole gnome org went down the drain. They often trhow away complete systems and replace them with something that are unusable "to drive coding contributors". They are completely disconnected from the community. Ubuntu tries to work around all that (by making their own shell, settings apps, etc) so it is not too obvious, but if you use debian, you probably spend several months without basic desktop funcionality every time they pushed something. Gnome is the inspiration for the systemD politics. So, no gnome is not closer to macOS. but gnome is broken by using copying macOS as an excuse by the designer teams.
  - hamandcheese 3y ago
    > Gnome is the inspiration for the systemD politics. Could you clarify what you mean by this?
    - simion314 3y ago
      Not parent , GNOME is not a community project, there seems to be one or a few big ego persons that do not even use GNOME and that push a "vision". Like they wanted CSD and they decreed that everyone, even non-GNOME apps like old games that nobody works on should implement CSD because they are not going to be backwards compatible. Same with notifications, old apps, third party apps should implement the GNOME way, they do not care for supporting non-GNOME stuff. But more power for them, they self select a niche user, a "GNOME user" that either is compatible with the GNOME way or they will contort themselves into it.
      - foresto 3y ago
        Their relentless push of design choices that I find intolerable is what eventually drove me to ditch Gtk in favor of Qt for my personal projects, and leave Xfce in favor of Plasma on my desktop. What a relief it has been. It's important to me that my UI be something I actually want to use.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  GNOME is closer only in look, it isn't in feel, and certainly isn't in development experience.
- alexhornby 3y ago
  same, KDE has great global menu support
MaxBarraclough 3y ago
> Qt is developed as a true open source project. Apart from when they deliberately withhold features from the Open Source releases. 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...
- tylerag 3y ago
  I dunno, that isn't terrible. The terrible part is where if you pay for a commercial license to use it in a proprietary application, you can't stand within 50 feet of the LGPL version. https://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/ https://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/: “Prohibited Combination” shall mean any effort to use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt, or use Licensed Software for creation of any such software. So you can't use KDE to write a program that links against the proprietary QT libraries.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    Is it ABI compatible? You could run KDE with the proprietary libraries.
    - jenadine 3y ago
      That would be violating the proprietary licence terms
      - ktm5j 3y ago
        Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, but could you explain why that is?
        tylerag 3y ago
        KDE was created with open source Qt. As in, the developers that wrote KDE used the LGPL version of Qt. To repeat myself, “Prohibited Combination” shall mean any effort to use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt.
tguvot 3y ago
sometimes i miss days of kde/gnome and qt/gtk discussions on slashdot. good times.
- akiselev 3y ago
  The good ol’ days when the internet was the battleground for harmless religious wars to decide spaces vs tabs, vim vs emacs, braces vs indentation, static vs dynamic typing, OOP vs FP, Windows vs Mac! Now it’s all donkeys and elephants, trolls and partisans.
  - tguvot 3y ago
    back then internet was exciting. back then there was internet
  - asdlfkjasdlfjkh 3y ago
    the harmless discussions were boring filler for the interesting ones. but we lost them all. The discussion GPL vs the corps. The corps wanted to use linux for free and make money. they won when linus gave up and added "tainted" message. now everyone just skin the reference implementation and ship a vulnerable modem or iot and we like that. Google and samsung ships billions of android devices *with no source code for most of the system* and we think that is fine and that android is open source and that linux is healthy when all it does is host a bunch of binary blobs for every piece of the hardware. then we had discussions on hosted GPL vs the corps. Where the corps won again when we all gave up and came up with the agpl compromise. aws business model is "bigger Cpanel, with more OSS software we get for free". They sold RH business model to everyone who thought RHEL was too expensive, by charging even more. genius.
    - tguvot 3y ago
      i see an oldtimer here :) yea.. well.. gpl/etc fight was lost. On the upside, we can take a look at wider benefit to society at whole. Through usage of gpl software, even in non-compliant way, were created a whole lot of companies (and jobs) and products that are widely used. Without it we might have had 1% of current selection and it would have been based on vxworks and totally locked down. you win some, you loose some
NayamAmarshe 3y ago
I will always love KDE! When I first used it, I said to myself, "How is this free!?" I was surprised to see how a free software organization made a much better software than a trillion dollar corpo. I just wish they had enough resources. KDE is the hope for the future of free software. I hope Valve can help them become mainstream. Just waiting for the day a big corpo will appear and make Linux compete with macOS and Apple's hardware directly.
- inetknght 3y ago
  > I was surprised to see how a free software organization made a much better software than a trillion dollar corpo. The surprise wears off as you start using more and more open source software that's either on-par with or significantly better than paid software.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Thats what happens when you allow engineers to do engineering stuff. I just wish there was a way to turn projects such as kde into commercial success stories, without compromising open source, privacy and tech. If financed properly kde and similar projects can survive long term.
- msie 3y ago
  It's not free if you want to sell a product made with it.
  - mattl 3y ago
    KDE? Sure it is.
  - fluoridation 3y ago
    So if I give away milk to convince people to buy my cheese, that means the milk isn't free?
    - msie 3y ago
p4bl0 3y ago
See also the post on KDE's website: https://dot.kde.org/2023/06/21/celebrating-25-years-kde-free-qt-foundation https://dot.kde.org/2023/06/21/celebrating-25-years-kde-free... I submitted it to HN but it didn't get any traction at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430030 /
gjvc 3y ago
I remember being so impressed using KDE Konqueror for the first time where the filer and browser were seamlessly integrated in one style of window -- this was a big deal and not imitated enough.
- gf3 3y ago
  [dead]
- pilaf 3y ago
  That was technically impressive no doubt, but I think it was itself probably inspired by Windows' explorer.exe, which used to work the same way: you could enter an HTTP address in the file explorer address bar and suddenly it became a web browser. Konqueror took it a bit further though by supporting other schemes like FTP, SFTP, and anything else that had a KIO[1] implementation. [1] https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kio/html/ https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kio/html/
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gjvc 3y ago
    dunno if it was inspired or obvious, but I remember the Konqueror window didn't flicker or the icons change jarringly when going from filesystem to web.... That's what made all the difference. But it was a long time ago, and I might be mistaken.
  - the-alchemist 3y ago
    Using the SFTP KIO backend was awesome. Was super impressed being able to copy/paste files between tabs in Konqueror, with both tabs being SFTP servers! FUSE is still catching up. I think Konqueror also supported man:// URLs, and those man pages were always nicely formatted.
musicale 3y ago
Slightly off-topic, but related to Qt's LGPL license: how are random users actually supposed to obtain the source code to an LGPL library that is included with an app distributed in binary form? For example, in Safari>Help>Acknowledgments there's lots of licensing information, including a lengthy LGPL section of fine print, but they really don't make it obvious how to get the LGPL source code. (It does seem to be on github, but there is no mention of that in the text.) And I really have no idea how to download the GPL/LGPL source code from a random iOS app. Shouldn't there be a download button or something for each GPL or LGPL component? (Maybe from the internet archive or gnu.org or something that is expected to persist longer than the average github/gitlab/bitbucket/sourceforge/etc. repo?)
- gettodachoppa 3y ago
  I did the research for the requirements to use Qt LGPL before (NOTE: idk if all these things are required, maybe the Qt Company is exaggerating when they claim all these things are required, someone more familiar with LGPL please chime in). 1. Product manual must mention you use Qt LGPL, and include the text of LGPL 2. Graphical software (desktop or terminal) must mention you use Qt LGPL, and include the text of LGPL. Usually this goes in Help -> About/Acknowledgements. 3. If the customer requests the source code, you must provide it on request. They can contact you and you mail them a USB flash drive or download link. Most companies seem to pre-emptively place the source on their website and include a link to it. 4. You must allow the user to rebuild/replace the Qt libraries your program uses, including instructions on how to do this if it's not trivial. So in your case, simply email the developer and request the LGPL source code and instructions on how to build/replace the product's LGPL libraries.
  - musicale 3y ago
    > simply email the developer How would I find out their email address if it's not listed? Occasionally I've tried contacting the developer via the "app support" link in the app store. Much of the time it's broken. Other times no contact information is provided. And of the times that there was actually a way to contact the developer, I've only rarely been able to get a response.

161 points by LorenDB 3y ago

After 20 years and a hundred dozen frameworks, Qt's C++ widget SDK is still the best designed API I have worked with. I haven't worked with it in years, but it was a great time.

mikae1 3y ago

KDE Plasma made getting back to desktop Linux after 15 years of macOS an easy task. Despite GNOME often being described as closer to macOS and Plasma closer to Windows I've found that no DE comes close to the configurability and polish that Plasma has. Congratulations!

_benj 3y ago
Same experience here. I was getting fed up with every new gnome release taking away more features and at the same time was missing the niceties of macOS. Decided to give plasma a try and it quickly turn into my daily driver. No need for gnome tweaks, or even confit files, right-click whatever I want to change and there’s a setting to change it!
- edbaskerville 3y ago
  And here! I switched from Mac to a Framework with Ubuntu/GNOME six months ago. Switched to Fedora/KDE Plasma this week and it's been so much better--everything is so much more discoverable. That said, Dolphin just got a bug where it crashes during thumbnail generation, and I'm seeing artifacts in Wayland with fractional scaling, but the KDE bug system is very visible and easy to navigate, so that I'm pretty confident these will be fixed soon. (I did know what I was getting into when I left Apple for the Wild West.)
  - mikae1 3y ago
    PCManFM-Qt is highly recommended. Looks and feels right at home in Plasma and is a little less quirky than Dolphin.
  - _benj 3y ago
    I've been using X11 and everything has been flawless.
    - edbaskerville 3y ago
      As far as I can tell there's no way to get proper pinch-to-zoom in Xorg, so I'm going with Wayland for now. It is totally insane that this is a thing for a user to think about.
asdlfkjasdlfjkh 3y ago
gnome is not closer to macOS. sadly gnome is coopted into making bad decisions under the guise of copying macOS. As soon as the "designers" got more funding than the coding contributors, the whole gnome org went down the drain. They often trhow away complete systems and replace them with something that are unusable "to drive coding contributors". They are completely disconnected from the community. Ubuntu tries to work around all that (by making their own shell, settings apps, etc) so it is not too obvious, but if you use debian, you probably spend several months without basic desktop funcionality every time they pushed something. Gnome is the inspiration for the systemD politics. So, no gnome is not closer to macOS. but gnome is broken by using copying macOS as an excuse by the designer teams.
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  > Gnome is the inspiration for the systemD politics. Could you clarify what you mean by this?
  - simion314 3y ago
    Not parent , GNOME is not a community project, there seems to be one or a few big ego persons that do not even use GNOME and that push a "vision". Like they wanted CSD and they decreed that everyone, even non-GNOME apps like old games that nobody works on should implement CSD because they are not going to be backwards compatible. Same with notifications, old apps, third party apps should implement the GNOME way, they do not care for supporting non-GNOME stuff. But more power for them, they self select a niche user, a "GNOME user" that either is compatible with the GNOME way or they will contort themselves into it.
    - foresto 3y ago
      Their relentless push of design choices that I find intolerable is what eventually drove me to ditch Gtk in favor of Qt for my personal projects, and leave Xfce in favor of Plasma on my desktop. What a relief it has been. It's important to me that my UI be something I actually want to use.
pjmlp 3y ago
GNOME is closer only in look, it isn't in feel, and certainly isn't in development experience.
alexhornby 3y ago
same, KDE has great global menu support

MaxBarraclough 3y ago

> Qt is developed as a true open source project. Apart from when they deliberately withhold features from the Open Source releases. 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...

tylerag 3y ago
I dunno, that isn't terrible. The terrible part is where if you pay for a commercial license to use it in a proprietary application, you can't stand within 50 feet of the LGPL version. https://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/ https://www.qt.io/terms-conditions/: “Prohibited Combination” shall mean any effort to use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt, or use Licensed Software for creation of any such software. So you can't use KDE to write a program that links against the proprietary QT libraries.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  Is it ABI compatible? You could run KDE with the proprietary libraries.
  - jenadine 3y ago
    That would be violating the proprietary licence terms
    - ktm5j 3y ago
      Forgive me if I'm missing something obvious, but could you explain why that is?
      - tylerag 3y ago
        KDE was created with open source Qt. As in, the developers that wrote KDE used the LGPL version of Qt. To repeat myself, “Prohibited Combination” shall mean any effort to use, combine, incorporate, link or integrate Licensed Software with any software created with or incorporating Open Source Qt.

tguvot 3y ago

sometimes i miss days of kde/gnome and qt/gtk discussions on slashdot. good times.

akiselev 3y ago
The good ol’ days when the internet was the battleground for harmless religious wars to decide spaces vs tabs, vim vs emacs, braces vs indentation, static vs dynamic typing, OOP vs FP, Windows vs Mac! Now it’s all donkeys and elephants, trolls and partisans.
- tguvot 3y ago
  back then internet was exciting. back then there was internet
- asdlfkjasdlfjkh 3y ago
  the harmless discussions were boring filler for the interesting ones. but we lost them all. The discussion GPL vs the corps. The corps wanted to use linux for free and make money. they won when linus gave up and added "tainted" message. now everyone just skin the reference implementation and ship a vulnerable modem or iot and we like that. Google and samsung ships billions of android devices *with no source code for most of the system* and we think that is fine and that android is open source and that linux is healthy when all it does is host a bunch of binary blobs for every piece of the hardware. then we had discussions on hosted GPL vs the corps. Where the corps won again when we all gave up and came up with the agpl compromise. aws business model is "bigger Cpanel, with more OSS software we get for free". They sold RH business model to everyone who thought RHEL was too expensive, by charging even more. genius.
  - tguvot 3y ago
    i see an oldtimer here :) yea.. well.. gpl/etc fight was lost. On the upside, we can take a look at wider benefit to society at whole. Through usage of gpl software, even in non-compliant way, were created a whole lot of companies (and jobs) and products that are widely used. Without it we might have had 1% of current selection and it would have been based on vxworks and totally locked down. you win some, you loose some

NayamAmarshe 3y ago

I will always love KDE! When I first used it, I said to myself, "How is this free!?" I was surprised to see how a free software organization made a much better software than a trillion dollar corpo. I just wish they had enough resources. KDE is the hope for the future of free software. I hope Valve can help them become mainstream. Just waiting for the day a big corpo will appear and make Linux compete with macOS and Apple's hardware directly.

inetknght 3y ago
> I was surprised to see how a free software organization made a much better software than a trillion dollar corpo. The surprise wears off as you start using more and more open source software that's either on-par with or significantly better than paid software.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  Thats what happens when you allow engineers to do engineering stuff. I just wish there was a way to turn projects such as kde into commercial success stories, without compromising open source, privacy and tech. If financed properly kde and similar projects can survive long term.
msie 3y ago
It's not free if you want to sell a product made with it.
- mattl 3y ago
  KDE? Sure it is.
- fluoridation 3y ago
  So if I give away milk to convince people to buy my cheese, that means the milk isn't free?
  - msie 3y ago

p4bl0 3y ago

See also the post on KDE's website: https://dot.kde.org/2023/06/21/celebrating-25-years-kde-free-qt-foundation https://dot.kde.org/2023/06/21/celebrating-25-years-kde-free... I submitted it to HN but it didn't get any traction at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430030 /

gjvc 3y ago

I remember being so impressed using KDE Konqueror for the first time where the filer and browser were seamlessly integrated in one style of window -- this was a big deal and not imitated enough.

gf3 3y ago
[dead]
pilaf 3y ago
That was technically impressive no doubt, but I think it was itself probably inspired by Windows' explorer.exe, which used to work the same way: you could enter an HTTP address in the file explorer address bar and suddenly it became a web browser. Konqueror took it a bit further though by supporting other schemes like FTP, SFTP, and anything else that had a KIO[1] implementation. [1] https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kio/html/ https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kio/html/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gjvc 3y ago
  dunno if it was inspired or obvious, but I remember the Konqueror window didn't flicker or the icons change jarringly when going from filesystem to web.... That's what made all the difference. But it was a long time ago, and I might be mistaken.
- the-alchemist 3y ago
  Using the SFTP KIO backend was awesome. Was super impressed being able to copy/paste files between tabs in Konqueror, with both tabs being SFTP servers! FUSE is still catching up. I think Konqueror also supported man:// URLs, and those man pages were always nicely formatted.

musicale 3y ago

Slightly off-topic, but related to Qt's LGPL license: how are random users actually supposed to obtain the source code to an LGPL library that is included with an app distributed in binary form? For example, in Safari>Help>Acknowledgments there's lots of licensing information, including a lengthy LGPL section of fine print, but they really don't make it obvious how to get the LGPL source code. (It does seem to be on github, but there is no mention of that in the text.) And I really have no idea how to download the GPL/LGPL source code from a random iOS app. Shouldn't there be a download button or something for each GPL or LGPL component? (Maybe from the internet archive or gnu.org or something that is expected to persist longer than the average github/gitlab/bitbucket/sourceforge/etc. repo?)

gettodachoppa 3y ago
I did the research for the requirements to use Qt LGPL before (NOTE: idk if all these things are required, maybe the Qt Company is exaggerating when they claim all these things are required, someone more familiar with LGPL please chime in). 1. Product manual must mention you use Qt LGPL, and include the text of LGPL 2. Graphical software (desktop or terminal) must mention you use Qt LGPL, and include the text of LGPL. Usually this goes in Help -> About/Acknowledgements. 3. If the customer requests the source code, you must provide it on request. They can contact you and you mail them a USB flash drive or download link. Most companies seem to pre-emptively place the source on their website and include a link to it. 4. You must allow the user to rebuild/replace the Qt libraries your program uses, including instructions on how to do this if it's not trivial. So in your case, simply email the developer and request the LGPL source code and instructions on how to build/replace the product's LGPL libraries.
- musicale 3y ago
  > simply email the developer How would I find out their email address if it's not listed? Occasionally I've tried contacting the developer via the "app support" link in the app store. Much of the time it's broken. Other times no contact information is provided. And of the times that there was actually a way to contact the developer, I've only rarely been able to get a response.