Ubuntu Planning To Drop Qt4 & Its Dependencies Ahead Of 20.04 LTS

[kpedersen]

Rewrite is way too strong word..

After migrating a sizeable Qt2.x application to Qt3 and then subsequently to Qt4. I vowed never to do it again and just rewrite the damn thing (preferably in a more sane toolkit).

[uid313]

Wish theyd do this for gtk2

Unfortunately GIMP still relies on GTK 2. 😥

[uid313]

The only software that I know that still use Qt 4 is Hydrogen Music 0.9.7, but luckily 1.0.0-beta uses Qt 5.

[cen1]

Its interesting to note that if you had chosen to use Qt4, you would now need to either rewrite into Qt5 or bundle your own libs... and yet, if you wrote your software to use Motif/libXm, you would still be good to go. Basically Motif has outlived Qt4 on Ubuntu.

Therefore going forward I would advise any long running program to use Motif rather than Qt5 because when Qt6 comes out, Ubuntu is unable to maintain versions correctly.

Luckily most proprietary software bundles Qt (such as Maya) and Gtk2. I can also honestly see Motif outliving an entire technology like Wayland.

Rewrite is way too strong word..

[kpedersen]

Its interesting to note that if you had chosen to use Qt4, you would now need to either rewrite into Qt5 or bundle your own libs... and yet, if you wrote your software to use Motif/libXm, you would still be good to go. Basically Motif has outlived Qt4 on Ubuntu.

Therefore going forward I would advise any long running program to use Motif rather than Qt5 because when Qt6 comes out, Ubuntu is unable to maintain versions correctly.

Luckily most proprietary software bundles Qt (such as Maya) and Gtk2. I can also honestly see Motif outliving an entire technology like Wayland.

[ed31337]

Seriously why stop at 4? Qt5 software could be snaps/flatpaks.

Oh please no... I hate snaps. They take up a ton of excess diskspace/memory and they start up really slow. It's really shameful that the base Ubuntu installation comes with anything as snaps. Ubuntu 18.04 came with System Monitor and Calculator pre-installed as snaps, which was ridiculous! I had to figure out how to uninstall the snaps and manually switched them over to normal apt-get dpkg's. I normally open and close the Calculator many times throughout my day -- that start up time from being a snap was a real drag!

[tildearrow]

Wish theyd do this for gtk2

I think it still is kinda early...

I may accept Qt 4 being dropped because:
- It's very old (9 years)
- Most Qt 4 apps can be ported to Qt 5 with ease, and about 95% have already been ported without problems
- Qt 4 does not have ANY kind of HiDPI support (GTK+ 2 at least has support for Oomox which can generate a pseudo-HiDPI theme)
- Apps that still want to stick to Qt 4 (e.g. Natron) can just pack Qt 4 with it (they already do, by the way)

[SpyroRyder]

Wish theyd do this for gtk2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Planning To Drop Qt4 & Its Dependencies Ahead Of 20.04 LTS

With Qt 6 becoming an increasing development focus and Qt 5 already seven years old, Ubuntu developers are looking at finally removing Qt 4 ahead of their 20.04 Long-Term Support release...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-20.04-LTS-No-Qt4