
The Qt Company is stopping Qt LTS releases. KDE is going to be fine - jrepinc
https://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-qt-company-is-stopping-qt-lts.html
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jrepinc
Another KDE developer (famous for Krita painting app) shares his thoughts
aboout this: [https://valdyas.org/fading/software/about-qt-offering-
change...](https://valdyas.org/fading/software/about-qt-offering-
changes-2020/)

~~~
Rochus
Great article.

>> it’s inevitable that Qt 5.15 will be forked into a community edition that
gets maintained, hopefully not just by KDE people, but by everyone who needs a
stable, LGPL licenced release of Qt5 for years to come

Right, I'll be happy to support that, if it's in a separate repository not
subject to the Qt contributor license agreement.

~~~
irishcoffee
I’ll second that. I’d relish the opportunity to be an active contributor to
this kind of movement. I use Qt at work every day.

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RossBencina
Here's the official Qt announcement:

[https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020](https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-
offering-changes-2020)

"We are making this change to encourage open-source users to quickly adopt new
versions. This helps maximize the feedback we can get form the community and
to emphasize the commercial support available to those with longer product
life cycles that rely on a specific Qt version."

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
This seems like a good move to me.

The only people who really need LTS releases are companies that are able and
[should be] willing to pay for LTS support.

If you're not willing to fulfill an invoice with 5+ digits, you don't need an
LTS release.

~~~
slezyr
> As for Krita, we’re using Qt 5.12 for our binaries because we carry a lot of
> patches that would need porting to Qt 5.13 or 5.14 and because Qt 5.13
> turned out to be very, very buggy. For Krita, using a stable version of Qt
> that gets bug fixes is pretty important, and that will be a problem, because
> we will lose access to those versions.

[https://valdyas.org/fading/software/about-qt-offering-
change...](https://valdyas.org/fading/software/about-qt-offering-
changes-2020/)

You need a LTS of some kind if latest version is buggy as hell.

~~~
makomk
Yeah, and I imagine this is only going to get worse from now on. The Qt
Company now have much less incentive to make the open source versions reliable
and usable, because their commercial customers aren't relying on that code
anymore, and something of a financial incentive to make them unsuitable for
anything except developing Qt itself in order to force people onto the
commercial packages.

~~~
bluGill
Commercial customers expect a stable version to use eventually. They also are
interested in some of the new features that come with version next and so will
update once in a while.

Some commercial customers stick to LTS releases, but not all do.

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Nokinside
I think this is good development.

Qt is legally obligated to license QT versions under GPL and LGPLv3. They
can't change that and there is no need for them to do so. This means that Qt
developers work for open source at the end. It's good that open source
developers take over maintaining open source versions from Qt. You can still
make commercial apps without buying Qt license just as before.

At the same time Qt business model, customers and direction it takes the
software have little to nothing to do with open source software. People
visiting Qt site get confused because they assumed that Qt Company supports
them and expected directions of how to do stuff with free licenses.

------
jacobush
I am nostalgic for the days of KDE (1999-2000 ish) when we believed Linux on
the desktop would happen for real, and also believed KDE would take the flag.
Gnome was so obviously clunky and bad, KDE felt like a breeze and reasonably
feature complete.

Since then, KDE has evolved into maybe the best API interface ever for desktop
programming, but the most confusing experience possible for actual users.
(This may not be true anymore, but KDE lost its mindshare among users in
relative terms a long time ago. I know of no-one who runs KDE on their Linux
desktops. Also, desktops are specialist tools now - we have mobile phones
instead and web apps for the rest.)

Yeah, I'm cranky. :)

~~~
dTal
I run Plasma on all my desktops (you must have anticipated this comment, hah).
I avoided KDE until a couple years ago because its performance was always
atrocious for me, even on high end machines. But when I gave it another go, I
was blown away - this, right here, is the Premium Desktop Linux
Experience(tm). And more than anything else, where it shines is its thoughtful
approach to human factors. You can see that every aspect of the system has
been subjected to the question "is this pleasant to use? how can we make it
better?" And, wonderful relief, it's also fast and light now. Since I've
instituted a Qt-first policy when choosing apps, and themed everything the
same, Qt and GTK, I've had a superbly consistent look and feel as well.

KDE deserves its mindshare back - there is _nothing_ else like it on Linux
today.

~~~
Fnoord
I know it is a loaded comment, but I genuinely wonder: how does KDE compare
with GNOME these days? I'm familiar with GNOME 3.34.

~~~
jrepinc
In my opinion, it is faster, more light-weight, and at the same time has more
features and is more customizable so you can set it up the way you want to
work with. In my opinion it is the best desktop currently available on
computers even ahead quite a bit compared to commercial ones.

~~~
pzone
The main downside is that it is buggy. This includes KDE's slow crawl toward
Wayland support. I love KDE's features but accept I will be experiencing more
resets with Plasma than even buggy Windows Explorer.

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creativecupcak3
I recently(about 3 months ago) started using Qt while learning C++ and I'm
working on a desktop App I'm excited about. Seeing this...makes me think the
future of Qt for non-commercial projects is rather bleak. Should I consider
porting the App to some other API/framework? This is very sad news for me, as
I was JUST starting to love Qt as an API for GUI applications. I don't want to
sound dramatic, but I'm borderline freaking out guys.

If you want check out my app here it
is-->[https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker](https://github.com/thebigG/Tasker)

~~~
Rochus
> makes me think the future of Qt for non-commercial projects is rather bleak

No reason for that. Qt is available under LGPL and GPL. This cannot be changed
retroactively and even today a large fraction of the commits comes from the
community. There is no reason to believe that this will change.

Qt is used by so many projects that there will always be someone to provide
the necessary patches. But it doesn't need that many patches because the code
is already so mature and proven. I have several projects that are still based
on Qt 4.4 or 4.8, for which there have been no patches for a long time. If
something doesn't work well, I usually find a workaround without changing Qt.

------
blacklight
That's exactly the reason why free software should never rely on the
benevolence of a for-profit company - or at least not only on their
benevolence, and not for too long - because that risks creating a single
point-of-failure.

That's exactly the reason why I have favoured GTK-based environments over KDE,
even though I acknowledge that the API provided by Qt is probably the best
I've happened to work with. GTK is owned by the community, and I know that as
long as there's a passionate developer out there working on it the project is
alive. When it comes to a product owned by Trolltech/Nokia/Qt Company...well,
I can't be that sure.

The history of computing is already full of examples of open source projects
that either died or have undergone complex forks and transition periods
because the company behind them decided to pull the plug, or go for a
different business model, or they went from being community-owned to being
business-owned. As open source software is more and more commoditised, and
unlike its counterparts it's expected to just build and run anywhere, without
all the business fluff and hysteria around, we can't afford to let that
happen.

However, purely community-owned open source software succumbs to the tragedy
of commons on the long run - but that's a comment for another post.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
This doesn't hurt open source users at all, though.

Only for-profit companies tend to actually need LTS releases. People don't.

~~~
jdboyd
Only mentioned in passing, but I think the lack of offline installer will hurt
open source users.

~~~
ognarb
Open Source users get their Qt version from a Linux package manager.

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bluGill
I have a commercial qt license (paid for by my job). What is stopping me from
downloading the latest QT LTS release and uploading it to my distros package
system? I'm not clear if anything actually stops this.

~~~
pritambaral
> What is stopping me from ...

The law, presumably. You need a license to re-distribute the Qt binaries,
because you are not the copyright holder of them. You may have access to use
them yourself, for your job, but you do not own the IP nor do _you_ have a
license to re-distribute copies without royalty.

What you're proposing would be akin to borrowing copyrighted books from a
library and uploading scans of those books, which would be copyright
infringement.

------
stabbles
So what version will apt install then... I wonder how much software will break
if apt quickly adopts new minor versions.

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postexitus
Is there a future for QT where everything is moving to web?

~~~
Rochus
Fair question. The desktop is still around. As long as plain old laptops or
desktop machines are required (which is still a high percentage of computers)
and there are developer who want to write lean platform independend
applications, Qt has a good chance to being considered. The embedded market is
very attractive for Qt. Actually it is also very suited for server side
applications and supported async style long before Node.js was invented. The
mobile market is likely lost though, and technologies like Dart/Flutter will
also go towards the desktop and already support web development.

