Commercial-Only Qt 5.15.3 LTS Now Released As Open-Source

[alcalde]

Qt6 is finally starting to be available in some distros, but if you are consuming it through bindings like PySide6 or PyQt6, those are still only available in Arch.

I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed; I just checked and it turns out I already have some Qt6 libraries installed and Qt6 is available through the package manager.

but if you are consuming it through bindings like PySide6 or PyQt6, those are still only available in Arch.

Available here in Tumbleweed too. And PySide and PyQt bindings are also available through the pip python package manager in any distro.

[betty567]

PySide and PyQt bindings are also available through the pip python package manager in any distro.

How does that help application developers upgrade their apps to PyQt6? Are you suggesting that they distribute a distro package with an undeclared PyQt6 dependency and then tell their users to pip install PyQt6 after installing a distro package? This is why the year of Linux on the desktop never comes.

My point stands: Qt Company has been a better partner to the Linux community than the Linux community has been to the Qt Company. If ALL of the distros would get their act together and make Qt6 + bindings universally available in all currently supported distros in the first 6-12 months after a major Qt release, Linux support would not be an anchor on upgrading to the newest major Qt release. A lot of smart application developers just abandon the potential 1% of the desktop market Linux offers in order to not have to deal with the fragmentation.

[alcalde]

How does that help application developers upgrade their apps to PyQt6? Are you suggesting that they distribute a distro package with an undeclared PyQt6 dependency and then tell their users to pip install PyQt6 after installing a distro package? This is why the year of Linux on the desktop never comes.

My point stands: Qt Company has been a better partner to the Linux community than the Linux community has been to the Qt Company. If ALL of the distros would get their act together and make Qt6 + bindings universally available in all currently supported distros in the first 6-12 months after a major Qt release, Linux support would not be an anchor on upgrading to the newest major Qt release. A lot of smart application developers just abandon the potential 1% of the desktop market Linux offers in order to not have to deal with the fragmentation.

First, I was responding to the claim that these bindings were only available in the Arch distribution. As for using pip, that's not much different than using snaps or flatpaks, which many distros already rely on. A Python-based program could also create its own virtual environment and install its requirements via pip on first run.

Some distributions have older software; some have newer software. Different distros serve different audiences. This isn't unique to Linux either. Hell, Windows doesn't even have an official package manager. There's nothing stopping any software from upgrading to Qt 6. If a distro doesn't package Qt 6, they weren't going to package the latest version of whatever software we're talking about anyway. Said software creator can just slap everything into an AppImage, snap or flatpack anyway as well as, in this example, simply install all of its requirements via pip and bypass package managers entirely - which, unless we're talking about rolling release distros, never have the latest versions of anything anyway. This is why many programs such as calibre have their own installers and recommend using it over a package manager. Lastly, you could use PyInstaller or similar and shove the python program and all its dependencies into one executable.

[bug77]

Meanwhile, while many distros are forcing half baked tech onto their beta testers, I mean users, the Linux roll-out of Qt6 has been a disaster, as expected. Qt6 is finally starting to be available in some distros, but if you are consuming it through bindings like PySide6 or PyQt6, those are still only available in Arch.

Windows user much?
No distro is forcing anything on anyone. If you want to play it safe, there's Debian, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE. If you're curious about the latest and greatest, there's more up-to-date distros, like Fedora and even rolling ones.
To date, no Linux distro has ever forcefully installed itself on my PC to make me use the latest Qt (or any other framework).

The only choices for application developers have are to complicate their build systems with dual qt5/qt6 support, move to qt6 now and stick most Linux users with an old version of their app, or else wait another 2-4 years for qt6 to be in Debian stable, RHEL, or whatever their oldest targets are. The world should be moving on from almost 10 year old Qt5, but Linux distros are creating a need for these LTS releases. This is why Linux is not an attractive target for desktop developers, if a desktop application is only on Mac and Windows they can already move purely to Qt6 any time they want.

Developing future versions in their own branch is a thing, you know?
On a system having just Qt5 installed, your app can pull in Qt6 just as easily as it it would pull in GTK.

[Charlie68]

I would just like to mention that LTS is not synonymous with stability, indeed in my experience it is synonymous with more problems, for this reason I am not interested in the LTS versions of Qt.
Personally from this new Qt policy, I have not noticed any difference and indeed if in this way the Lts distributions will update Qt is good news.