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.

In order to avoid supporting Qt4 for years to come while most Qt software has already been ported to Qt5 sans some old KDE components and the like, Ubuntu developers are planning to ensure Qt4 is completely removed in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS due out next April. Ubuntu 19.10 is the last planned release with Qt4 packages present.

There still are various Qt4 and KDE4 packages remaining, but either they need to be ported to Qt5 over the next couple of months or they will be dropped from Ubuntu. Once Ubuntu 19.10 is released in October and 20.04 LTS development opens is when they plan to carry out the death sentence to Qt4.

More details via this mailing list post.