QT C++ Desktop End of Life?

[neosettler]

Hi,

Been using QT C++ for desktop for as long it is was owned by Trolltech. It's been a wild ride and I always though "This is the way!". I've noticed over the years that the development for "Desktop" new widgets and improvements isn't happening. I realized that all the awaited features are getting stuffed in QT Quick/QML and "Desktop" is left behind with last century tools and widgets.

Any thoughts and/or hope that C++ Desktop would eventually get a facelifted with most recent widgets?

Thanks

[wysota]

Are you asking about visual or functional facelift?

[elcuco]

Qt/Digia are not interested in developing it any further.

Desktop is not where they make money, so they have no intensive. I am developing a desktop program - and I feel a lot of "subsystems" are missing in Qt6. Many widgets I would like to have, I am just writing myself. Lots of "modern" programming paradigms are missing from widgets.

Its not dead.But I feel its a dead end.

[d_stranz]

I too develop only desktop Qt/C++ applications. I stopped with Qt 5.15.3 because Qt's licensing model for Qt 6 was unacceptable for me. The set of UI widgets in that release are sufficient for my needs, and if I need something else, I look to KDAB, KDE Frameworks, or write my own.

I'm not all that worried if my applications look a bit old-fashioned. The market for which I write my applications isn't impressed by gee whiz UI features, they want usability and more importantly the results that the software produces.

[Ginsengelf]

Yes, same here. We also stayed at Qt 5.15 because of the licensing of Qt6.

Ginsengelf

[elcuco]

which widgets were removed from "free" usage in Qt6 but were available in Qt5?

[d_stranz]

which widgets were removed from "free" usage in Qt6 but were available in Qt5?

I don't think anything was removed between Qt5 and Qt6, at least not in the QtCore, QtGui, and QtWidgets components. There could have been new things added in Qt6, but since I'm not using it I can't tell you what those might be, if anything.

As the OP said, there have been many additions to QtQuick/QML which apparently do not have corresponding implementations on the QtWidgets side. In the early days of QtQuick and QML, things implemented on that side were also implemented on the QtWidgets side, but possibly that is because most of the work was in ensuring that QtQuick and QML were a more or less complete mapping from QtWidgets and not the other way around.

[tuli]

What licensing changes are you referring to from qt5 to qt6? I was under the impression nothing much changed. Dont see anything in https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/license-changes.html either.

[d_stranz]

What licensing changes are you referring to from qt5 to qt6?

I was using Qt5 under a commercial license. For Qt6, the terms were changed to a model where you had to pay for the license every year for as long as your product was available for sale, even after development had stopped. I did not want to be held hostage to that kind of license. The Qt5 commercial license is perpetual and I don't have to continue paying if I don't want support. The Qt6 license is also very expensive, too much for a 2-person software company, only one of whom uses Qt.