With Qt 6.0 Development To Heat Up, 2018 Should Be Exciting For Qt

[mrtruxton]

KDE users: Yet another new major version? Nooooooo not again!!!

(For each new Qt major version, the KDE devs have started all over and created nothing like the previous KDE version.)

Yeah, i feel you brother. I have been a long time KDE user. ( since version 2.0 ) And every major KDE version took around a year after the first release to become anything like the then stable previous version. I felt 3.0 was pretty stable at the end of its life. Solid for daily use. As for the current version. To be honest i still don't know how to feel about plasma. Plasma still feel a little.. strange. Not sure how to describe it. On the other hand. Its free software and if they want to take their platform in a new direction thats their right. If they decide to break everything again i'll be holding on to the last LTS distro i can find and wait out the first year though, don't feel like being experimented upon again... That is ... if i have the patience... which i don't...

Ohh KDE, why do you make my life soo complicated....

[Luke_Wolf]

Sorry, my bad. I didn't mean to make it sound like "people on Phoronix". I was talking about various places on the internet, including Phoronix. But yeah, birdie is one of them.

Well alright, basically though birdie is either a pathological liar or a lying sack of shit depending on whether he actually believes the nonsense he spews (around 90% of every post is either a lie or something he's making up), so I consider quoting him about as valid as quoting FunkStar or Funkstar's alt accounts in this context. He may exist but he's not pushing anything close to a mainstream view.

I can't speak to elsewhere on the internet you might be thinking of though so I'll have to assume you're correct about them pushing that nonsense, in which case I condemn them for being idiots. if that's the particular stance they're taking.because the situation is much more nuanced than that.

[Vasant1234]

And of course QT6 will be a new API incompatible with QT5 and developers will be scrambling to rewrite their applications to the new API. Is it any wonder that Linux desktop is not going anywhere ?.

[cen1]

Sounds to me that API/ABI changes should not be significant, at least not for most common stuff.

Please stop dreaming about abandoning Qt containers and using STL, it is just no gonna happen. You need to be backward compatible. Just don't use them in new projects..

[misp]

so we'll see how much it causes issues this time around.

Is there some other industry example where they did migrations in similar way?
To me this looks like unnecessary complications since either way you have to touch both libs and apps with the new version. Relying only on qt (instead of libs like a middleman) means you'd have to touch just one thing.
Or am I wrong?

[iamsergio]

What was decided at QtCS2017 was that Qt 5 is fine and we won't see Qt 6 in the next 3 or 4 years, so hold your horses

[Vistaus]

And of course QT6 will be a new API incompatible with QT5 and developers will be scrambling to rewrite their applications to the new API. Is it any wonder that Linux desktop is not going anywhere ?.

They could use a different toolkit with less API/ABI breakage, like FOX or EFL. Also, how is this Linux's problem? On Windows, there are currently 3 to choose from: ye olde, classic desktop software toolkit/API, Modern UI and the new Universal Apps one, which is also split into two seperate ABI's (one of them being stable, the other one being in development currently). And the last one is esp. bad because there are two major updates a year now and a lot of API's change, which is what a A LOT of developers complained about yet MS hasn't done anything about it.
But Windows still has the most market share on the desktop side, so apparently developers accept MS's behavior. So why wouldn't they accept it on Linux either then?

[mzs.112000]

I hope Qt6 will be backwards compatible with Qt5, or KDE will get another total rewrite just like with Plasma 5.
It might be possible for KDE to fork Qt5, backport security fixes and maybe some important features from Qt6, and not rewrite the whole desktop again, but that is unlikely to happen.