Ubuntu Hoping To Remove Qt 5 Before Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Hoping To Remove Qt 5 Before Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Ubuntu developer Simon Quigley laid out the plans for hoping Ubuntu packages will move from Qt 5 to Qt 6 so that by the time of the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cycle in early 2026 that the older version of this graphical toolkit can be removed...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Hopes-Removing-Qt-5

[ahrs]

Among the early concerns with the plan is that KDE Plasma has a hard dependency on VLC via the Phono-GStreamer package, but VLC won't be ported to Qt 6 until the VLC 4.0 release

Can we please get phonon-mpv adopted as an official KDE project? It uses libmpv instead of VLC and I know that would make a lot of users happy, especially Arch users, etc. ngraham what would it take for this to happen?

[mathletic]

I hope Ubuntu can give their initiative some traction. Let us hope they also spend some resources on this and get some partners doing so, too.

It would help the Qt, C++, and KDE ecosystems to move to Qt 6. Qt 6.0 was released almost 4 years ago! Moving to Qt 6 also means having C++17, getting rid of older compilers, build systems and other components.

Anyways, I just donated $ 20 to the VideoLan project.

[bavay]

I find myself often at odds with Ubuntu's strategy, but I definitely agree Ubuntu could dump Qt 5 soon!

Porting code from Qt5 to Qt6 is not that bad, with some care it is feasible to support both versions of Qt in the source code (I've done exactly that for a project I'm responsible for, so we can compile with Qt6 on Windows and Mac and QT5 on most Linux distributions).

[CommunityMember]

The goal is good, but will not be achieved by the 26.04 target unless the proposer starts contributing patches to the (what they show are to be approximately) 1000 projects on the list (asking others to do work almost never succeeds).

Instead, if Ubuntu stops building the Qt5 libraries for their distro, someone will create an independent PPA which everyone with a Qt5 dependent package will start depending on (which, depending on the processes/membership of the PPA, may have different support issues), or, perhaps worse yet, start building with their own embedded Qt5 versions.

Sometimes porting from Qt5 to Qt6 is easy. And sometimes it is not. The larger the project, the less likely it is to be on the easy side. And the reality is some large projects, even those widely used, do not always have a large community of developers.

[Danny3]

Like Canonical would care about Qt / KDE software...
Whom they are trying to fool?

[Weasel]

gdi32 is still in Windows. 30 years old library.

And this is why Linux userland is a joke.

[Vistaus]

gdi32 is still in Windows. 30 years old library.

And this is why Linux userland is a joke.

gdi32 is not particularly a good thing. And besides, Microsoft has experimented with more modern toolkits as well, most of which they have already abandoned. I'm 100% sure they would drop gdi32 too, if they wouldn't have so many deals with businesses that have decades-old software and rely on it.

[Weasel]

gdi32 is not particularly a good thing. And besides, Microsoft has experimented with more modern toolkits as well, most of which they have already abandoned. I'm 100% sure they would drop gdi32 too, if they wouldn't have so many deals with businesses that have decades-old software and rely on it.

That's the entire point! They added new toolkits while keeping the old around for compatibility.

[Ladis]

Linux is now like macOS. Use new APIs or die. We don't want unmaintained software.