KDE Now Maintaining Their Own Set of Patches For Qt 5

[MadCatX]

If you drop using QTEverything (god awful QString, QXML, QNetwork, etc) then that would actually help in just using state-of-the-art libraries without layers of bugs and lower maintaining costs.

But what would you replace it with? Arguably one of the best things about Qt is its consistency. Once you've learned some part of Qt, you've basically learned it all. It uses the same basic datatypes, mechanisms and designs pretty much everywhere. Not having to jump back and forth between different ways how to the same things is a huge win.

[MadCatX]

What is GTK missing that Qt app developers want?

Basically everything. Qt knows how to do file system access, networking, image manipulation, audio and video playback, IPC, process management, threading. It also does it equally well on a lot of platforms from Windows to QNX. GTK has always been a Linux-focused GUI toolkit which is today developed mostly to serve the needs of GNOME.

[DanL]

Cmon guys. Any chance of a fork is dead now. KDE chose Qt6. Nothing will change.

Good. Now go away and quit trolling.

[Alexmitter]

This isn't about looks, it's about (missing) functionality/configurability.

I guess you are unable to differentiate between GTK and Gnome with Gnome not even using GTK for its shell.

[Alexmitter]

Basically everything. Qt knows how to do file system access, networking, image manipulation, audio and video playback, IPC, process management, threading. It also does it equally well on a lot of platforms from Windows to QNX. GTK has always been a Linux-focused GUI toolkit which is today developed mostly to serve the needs of GNOME.

Yes, that is a good point against the mess that Qt is. Its not just a toolkit, its your network stack, your image manipulation stack, video playback stack and hell it even has a 3D engine included. Qt serves everyone and everything and that equally bad.

[fafreeman]

this is pretty much the reason why i always thought KDE being dependent on QT was a mistake. i understand toolkits can be hard to make, but i never understood why they didn't adopt GTK. either try to work with it or make their own toolkit off of it via a fork. rather than playing with the hand grenade called QT. its like every year or two there's some sort of big controversy with QT that has something to do with licensing.

any benefit that QT has i have a very hard time believing its worth this mess.

[Alexmitter]

Looks like someone has been drinking almost as much GNOME Kool-Aid as 144.

Fanboyism.

[Alexmitter]

I'm sad about this whole situation. KDE is kind of a small team. A team of people who show of whats possible with Qt and doing so for years and years. Yet they have to do even more work because of this situation. From the users point of view - is there anything we can actually do?


https://relate.kde.org
http://www.kde.com/donations

If KDE is the best you can do with Qt, it would be a massive embarrassment.

The people who actually show what is possible are the people who use it in embedded scenarios, who actually write pretty good software.

[Alexmitter]

All the discussions in this thread are nonsense, a waste of time and to spread hatred to Qt.

Poor Qt, it must really suffer from all that hatred.

First, Qt is GPL and LGPL licensed.

Sure, but the Qt company and only them decide if a certain release is GPL/LGPL or if it stays fully proprietary as they wish. That is nothing but a loose promise of the Qt

Second, if you contribute Qt you allow them to make a dual license in GPL/LGPL and proprietary, yes, but your code will still be GPL.

That is technically incorrect.
The moment you commit to the Qt repos, you have to give away all rights to your code, it is not anymore GPL/LGPL licensed and you do not hold any rights on it, you could not even have it removed later. That is a workaround around the net of ownership that normally protects a GPL/LGPL project from ever ending up proprietary.
Right in this moment, a technician at the Qt Company could extend code that was committed by a KDE person in the 5.x stack and the KDE community will never see that improved code.

Third, in a year KDE will be transitioned to Qt6.

More like 3 years for the core projects and another 2 for the surrounding projects.

[MadCatX]

Qt serves everyone and everything and that equally bad.

I disagree. For at least 90 % of cases, functionality provided by Qt is good enough. Need to load a PDF and paint in on the screen? Or do text encoding conversions? Or fetch a JSON from a server over TLS, parse it and display the content? Or maybe you have some data in a SQLite database? Perhaps now you want to visualize that data in a 3D chart? Not a problem, Qt has your back. Unless you have some very specific needs, I really don't see what is Qt doing badly.