The Biggest Problem With GTK & What Qt Does Good

[blackiwid]

While Dirk and Linus aren't enthusiastic front-end / application developers, they have found Qt to do much better than GTK for their cross-platform program.

. Dirk also found the Qt Creator IDE to be incredibly good. Dirk even switched from being a long-time emacs user to now using the Qt Creator integrated development environment.

I don?t really get that, the name QTCreator implies that its at least 99% a specialiest QT-Apps-Only Development Tool. When I go on their side their is nothing that makes me belive the opposite. Its even a part of the toolkit it self.

So when Dirk in reallity is not primary a GUI designer how can he switch from the feature-richest Development-plattform and Operating System Emacs to such a gui-only tool.
Of course u can write c and other stuff even in plugin-less gedit, but that makes it not a good IDE.

For me it sounds he never was able to use gtk or emacs productive because he always got angree that what he wanted to do, did not work the way he thought would be the best or something. And now he tries to troll with one post somewhere everything he hates, emacs and gtk.

[blackout23]

What I don't like about Qt apps from my experience with KDE is that theming is crap. I don't know if that's KDEs fault but on Gnome 3 you just set your Gtk+ theme and your window decorations to use the same theme and everything looks nice and consistent. With Qt on KDE there is no way to change the look from the oxygen style to something different without having ending up having applications that look like crap. In the GTK world the the GTK+ theme determins how the buttons, progressbars, colors etc look and the corresponding window decoration makes sure that it all looks nice. In KDE that's almost impossible. It's nice that you can easily download more themes and window decorations and color schemes from within KDE, but I have not found a single combo that looks halfway decent. I tried bespin and qtcurve but that didn't help either.

[marek]

I use Qt Creator for everything too. If you don't know me, I work on Mesa and occasionally on the kernel, libdrm, piglit, and xf86-video-ati. Qt Creator is absolutely the best IDE I've ever worked with and before that I had been a long-time user of Visual C++ (the best on Windows at the time) and tried Eclipse and a couple of others. In Qt Creator, I only use the editing and compiling features and usually just do "Import an existing project", which creates a new project by importing all source files from a specific directory and subdirectories and runs "make" when I build it. It's pretty good even for kernel development. I usually import entire git repos, but with the kernel I only import the drivers/gpu/drm subtree and all the header files used by it. Thanks to the Qt Creator team, I wouldn't have been so productive without it.

[curaga]

IMHO there should be one (and only one) widget library. It would make application development much easier on Linux. On Windows you can ask the operating system to create a window, and this is something that I miss on Linux. There are a lot of things I love about Linux, but the graphical interface is not one of them for sure.

XCreateWindow

[wargames]

IMHO there should be one (and only one) widget library. It would make application development much easier on Linux. On Windows you can ask the operating system to create a window, and this is something that I miss on Linux. There are a lot of things I love about Linux, but the graphical interface is not one of them for sure.

[cbamber85]

Since Qt5, Qt isn't real C++ framework as Javascript(QML) is main language.

No it isn't. QML is little more than a DSL that can hook into the C++ Qt libraries, it vastly simplifies the creation of modern UIs hence why it's being pushed. But it doesn't stop anyone writing in C++, in fact it would being pointless writing anything other than trivial GUI applications in QML as it just wasn't designed for that.

Widgets are in maintenance

Not entirely true, a new QWidget class was added in 5.2 alone - but I think you're right, this is the general direction for GUI applications. And I personally think it's the right direction.

Javascript is much more defective language than C++. It is stupid idea to write one application in two incompatible languages.

This sentence makes no sense.

[JS987]

Qt is one of the fastest C++ frameworks out there

Since Qt5, Qt isn't real C++ framework as Javascript(QML) is main language, Widgets are in maintenance and C++ became second class citizen. Javascript requires JIT compiler and garbage collector which are bloat C++ applications don't need.
Javascript is much more defective language than C++. It is stupid idea to write one application in two incompatible languages.

[cbamber85]

Other praise that Dirk had for the Qt tool-kit included the qmake build system

Which is actually being phased out once Qbs is ready, probably when it starts to be used to compile Qt itself inhouse.

[Nth_man]

Qt is not bloated, but modular and light enough to be used in embedded devices. For example:

Beaglebone: Example Qt Embedded Linux Application

This is the third video in a set of three on Qt application development on the Beaglebone or any other embedded Linux device. The first video introduces the LCD module that I used and the second video is where I set up a full toolchain for C++ Qt application development under embedded Linux (Qt for embedded devices). This toolchain allows us to cross compile Qt applications for the Beaglebone, deploy the applications directly to the beaglebone with a single click and even use remote debugging using gdbserver to diagnose any problems with our applications. The main use of this platform is for GUI application development when a LCD module, or external display is present.

In this the final video in this series I demonstrate an example application that uses an accelerometer and LED to act as output/input devices and I provide the full source code. I explain how the source code is structured and how the physical circuit was configured.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNvOyY9zK1o

[Cyber Killer]

Doesn't change the fact Qt is a bloated pos.

W00t? Get your facts straight... Qt is one of the fastest C++ frameworks out there (I remember a benchmark once that showed that Qt's overhead over plain C++ was only a few %). For most handy desktop applications written in Qt the shared libs take only around 30MiB of RAM.

You might be mistaking Qt for KDE, many people make that false assumption that because KDE is written in Qt and it's not too fast (although I have no problems with the performance of KDE), then they think that it's Qt's fault. It's not - KDE is large on it's own and much of it's percieved "slowness" on low end machines is attributed to useful KDE services running in the background, like Nepomuk, KIO, etc, which are there by design - KDE is not meant for low performance desktops.

If anything - Qt is not bloated.