The Qt Company is stopping Qt LTS releases. KDE is going to be fine

https://tsdgeos.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-qt-company-is-stopping-qt-lts.html

by jrepinc • 6 years ago

72 72 6 years ago

tsdgeos.blogspot.com

jacobush2• 6 years ago

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. :)

jhauris• 6 years ago

You are right that kde lost a lot of mindshare, but these days it is really good (I prefer it to the other DE options). My whole family runs kde, from running a small business to children of a wide range of ages playing games and doing school work.

I don't think computers are any more of a specialist tool now then 20 years ago, really. Mobile phones have just expanded the number of people who are able to do things like listen to digital music which used to be limited to a relatively elite minority on desktops.

usrusr3• 6 years ago

Precisely 20 years ago you might be right, but the year 2000 later turned out to be that one year where mp3 piracy crossed over from still somewhat niche to utter mainstream. And before practical portable mp3 solutions, that was entirely a desktop PC experience. People who could barely type in January would have built their own PC from components by the end of that year. (Some regional shifts related to internet availability and pricing models might apply)

Changes happened crazy fast in those days.

Santosh83• 6 years ago

I've tried several KDE distros over the years and they have all been quite easy and pleasant to use, despite the occasional crash. There was nothing particularly bad about the UX. The reason it has not been successful is of course the largest Linux companies choosing deliberately to back GNOME. The initial reasons may have been legal but they stuck with GNOME despite the latter removing features during 2 to 3 transition and despite the legal situation resolving and KDE becoming better and better over the years. Corporate steering of s/w is very real though most seem to tiptoe around the matter...

dTal2• 6 years ago

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.

Fnoord3• 6 years ago

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.

usrusr3• 6 years ago

In hindsight it feels like KDE was fighting the last war's battles, eagerly marching on on the path towards an OOP modularity promised land, still trying to one-up Microsoft's OLE and COM long after those fell out of the hype spotlight at Redmond. I'd be surprised if there wasn't even a lot of CORBA in KDE at one point.

makomk2• 6 years ago

If I remember rightly, one of the big differences between KDE and GNOME was that GNOME fell for CORBA in a big way whereas KDE rejected it.

theodric• 6 years ago

I dropped Linux in favor of IRIX on the desktop, because I found GNOME clunky and KDE a Windows ripoff, and ran that until I could get a Mac. When I got the Mac, despite being new, it was so slow that I installed Linux and WindowMaker on it instead. I soon broke the Mac, and got a cheap ThinkPad and ran Windows until I could afford a Mac again. I've had a Mac since 2008 now. I'd occasionally play with Linux, but especially once Unity appeared and perverted everyone's expectations of what Linux looked like, I thought the war was lost.

A couple years back, I decided to try out Plasma. Ho lee schitt. Plasma is good. Not as good as macOS, but Linux-good.

simion3144• 6 years ago

but the most confusing experience possible for actual users

What do you mean? I think KDE is not confusing at all, you have the bottom taskbar, you have the start menu you alt+tab betwen applications. The only complaints similar to yours are from people that dislike the Settings section, there is a reason that section is complex and that is the Linux desktop is complex, there are many parts like(Qt,GTK, window manager, shell etc) but you could always have a distribution hide the settings by default and provide a KDE for newbs with almost no options and rename Settings to KDE Tweaks and you install the features from internet or hack plasmoids to add or remove paddings and features.

jacobush2• 6 years ago

"Could" have, is the key. There is no push from the project itself. I'm not saying there needs to be, but I think KDE lost millions of users because of it. Imagine if ElementaryOS also were the people behind Gnome, or behind KDE. THAT would be spell quality software. Alas, this is not how open source works.

ognarb3• 6 years ago

This days KDE is trying quite hard to improve the default user experience and letting the world know about these improvements. This is mostly thanks to the work of Nate Graham and his blog posts https://pointieststick.com/, but also tons of new contributors coming each week.

Here is his roadmap for 2020: https://pointieststick.com/2020/01/01/kde-roadmap-for-2020/ and his review of the year 2019: https://pointieststick.com/2019/12/31/2019-the-year-in-revie...

Fnoord3• 6 years ago

Nate Graham! His posts often get quoted by Phoronix (which is in my RSS feeds). I love reading them even though I don't use KDE myself (right now; in the past I ran KDE 1/2/3 on Linux and KDE 2 on Windows).

Why? Because I like to keep a little up-to-date in Linux UI land (why I visit Phoronix). Nate Graham's weekly post are well written summaries which link to additional in-depth information if you prefer. You gave two good, relevant examples of that.

mindcrime• 6 years ago

I know of no-one who runs KDE on their Linux desktops

I run a KDE desktop exclusively...

RossBencina• 6 years ago

Here's the official Qt announcement:

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."

CiPHPerCoder4• 6 years ago

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.

Rochus12• 6 years ago

That's not correct. Me and many other Qt developers known to me still use older versions like Qt 4.8 or 5.4 without any need to upgrade. Upgrading causes a lot of effort and risks. If you don't depend on the new new feature (e.g. all of my projects would still work with Qt 4.4) why should you spend that effort?

slezyr• 6 years ago

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...

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

ComputerGuru• 6 years ago

Where’s the logic in your statement? Say I’m an open source developer writing a Qt app. I have less time to wrangle with updates and api breakage than a company with full-time Qt developers working on their products.

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 6 years ago

Yeah, I mean, why would anyone else want stability in things they rely on?

JohnFen2• 6 years ago

Don't all devs need the LTS release? Why would you want to build something on constantly shifting sand?

berti• 6 years ago

The way I read it patches for the LTS versions stop being available to open source consumers when the next minor release occurs. That means open source Qt applications are forced to deal with all the new bugs that come with a new Qt release much more regularly, saving the commercial customers the hassle. That is exactly why they did this, they even say so in the announcement. That makes Qt a lot less attractive to me.

blacklight• 6 years ago

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.

CiPHPerCoder4• 6 years ago

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

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

gmueckl3• 6 years ago

The lack of an offline installer (i.e. a standalone installer that can be archived) is a bigger issue in my opinion.

Rochus12• 6 years ago

This looks like a rather general remark to me, not specifically related to Qt. I don't think your argument is valid for Qt. Or do you have any representative evidence? Do you actually use Qt in your own projects at all?

jdboyd• 6 years ago

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

akvadrako• 6 years ago

You might be right in general, but this isn't a good example. Even if the Qt company was a non-profit owned by the community they might have decided on the same course of action.

Rochus12• 6 years ago

But why is this an issue? The source code is available under GPL and LGPL regardless what the company does. If they would decide to no longer open source their fixes or new releases the community has still the source of the last release and can continue to maintain and develop it. There are several large open source projects which are driven by a large community; so even if the Qt Company would no longer maintain Qt (today about 50% of the commits seem to come from the community already) then others would I'm sure.

Currently I mostly see an issue in the fact that an open source developer contributing to the Qt repository run by the Qt Company signs (by action of checkin) a contributor agreement which lets the Qt company use the contributions of the developer commercially and file a law suite based on code provided by the open source developer. If there was a Qt fork independently managed by the Qt Company (e.g. on Github) people could contribute without this issue.

simion3144• 6 years ago

This is FUD, KDE has full rights to fork Qt.

Rochus12• 6 years ago

Not only KDE. Qt is available under LGPL and GPL, so everyone has that right.

bluGill3• 6 years ago

GTK environments (IE gnome) owe at least as much to corporations, perhaps more so. In theory GTK is community owned, but in practice it is big companies calling the shots.

creativecupcak3• 6 years ago

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

Rochus12• 6 years ago

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.

jrepinc2• 6 years ago

Another KDE developer (famous for Krita painting app) shares his thoughts aboout this: https://valdyas.org/fading/software/about-qt-offering-change...

Rochus12• 6 years ago

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.

ognarb3• 6 years ago

Same here :D

irishcoffee• 6 years ago

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.

arianvanp• 6 years ago

Do any of the distributions depend on these binaries in the first place? It sounds like a non-issue to me. Don't all popular distros build all their packages from source anyway where possible?

postexitus• 6 years ago

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

Rochus12• 6 years ago

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.

stabbles• 6 years ago

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

Nokinside• 6 years ago

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.

bluGill3• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

The Qt Company is stopping Qt LTS releases. KDE is going to be fine

Related Stories