> The problem, however, is that Qt has no foothold in mobile devices. It's more or less an open secret that Nokia has a Linux/Qt-based S40 replacement powered

> The problem, however, is that Qt has no foothold in mobile devices. It's more or less an open secret that Nokia has a Linux/Qt-based S40 replacement powered by Qt in the works, from all the rumors floating around (keyword "Meltemi"). I'll not speculate on its success potential; Nokia has disappointed me in the past. As a Qt user, I do hope it will do well. > There is a huge community of users that uses Qt to just write (and maintain) desktop applications. Believe me, I know. I write and maintain some of them. I'm a KDE developer. > Qt Quick sucks for that. Depends. We're getting some rather good mileage out of QML in our desktop shell, actually, and for some _componments_ of regular applications it'll do very nicely in short order as well. I agree that Quick isn't there yet in terms of being a full QWidget replacement, though. Right now there's somewhat of a gulf where some things that are hard with QWidget are wonderfully easy with QML, but once you leave QML's prime areas of competence and need to customize, it gets a lot harder than customizing QWidget tends to be. The Ars article actually cites a really good example that I've hit upon myself, as one of the apps I maintain is a heavy user of QTextDocument technology. Because the QML Text items do not allow low-level access to the QTextDocument they're based on, if you want to do advanced QTextDocument stuff in QML, you need to go quite low-level and write your own QML items in C++. It's doable, but QTextBrowser & Co allow more direct access under the hood and don't invite that overhead. However, QWidget is staying put in Qt 5, and QML is still relatively young. There's ample time for a transition to occur. Let's hope it'll work out well. > For those users, the future of Qt seems bleak: it's not in the hands of a company that caters to that audience (Trolltech's primary source of income was Qt, Nokia's is cell phones) and development pace is glacial. While I'm onboard with a healthy dose of skepticism and staying aware of possible trouble, my own outlook is really not that bleak. Under Nokia, Qt has become a pretty decent open source project with working contribution paths - something it never was under Trolltech. KDE has contributed tens of thousands of lines of code to Qt thanks to that, and we remain a heavy user of QWidget at the momemt. I'm not saying we wouldn't be even better off if Nokia were more interested in the desktop, but I feel we have a shot at making our own future. (Of course, KDE is also looking at mobile; see our tablet user interface Plasma Active. It won't surprise you to learn that it's quite heavily based on QML.)