"Custom toolchains" is massively overstating things. The only mandatory thing is the MOC, which is just a preprocessor that spits out some more C++ code for you

"Custom toolchains" is massively overstating things. The only mandatory thing is the MOC, which is just a preprocessor that spits out some more C++ code for your regular compiler to build, and it's easily integrated with ordinary Makefiles (or whatever other half-sane build process you want). qmake is optional. http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/moc.html http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/moc.html http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3632038/can-i-use-qt-without-qmake-or-qt-creator http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3632038/can-i-use-qt-with... (And I don't know what to make of your comment about remote X. Years ago I sometimes ran entire remote KDE sessions in Xnest and didn't really have any problems, so this would seem like either something new, or a problem with your environment.)