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.

The hope is that for the next major Long Term Support (LTS) release, Qt 5 can be removed from the Ubuntu archive and just shipping Qt 6. This is similar to Ubuntu's prior phasing out of the Qt 4 toolkit and trying to get Qt 5 out by Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to avoid that long maintenance period.

The Ubuntu 26.04 LTS without Qt 5 is simply a goal at this point. The hope is developers will help with the upstream projects in transitioning from Qt 5 to Qt 6, which is less of a burden than it was going from Qt 4 to Qt 5. There is also the Qt5Compat library to help with making the move for Qt5 apps to Qt 6 libraries.

The expressed plan for removing Qt 5 from Ubuntu before Ubuntu 26.04 LTS was made on Ubuntu Discourse.

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. Currently there is no timeline for VLC 4.0 shipping. Ubuntu Touch developers working on the Lomiri (former Unity 8) code also have raised doubts if they will be able to migrate to Qt 6 in time for Ubuntu 26.04. In any event we'll see over the next year if enough progress is made for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to ship with the Qt 5 packages removed.