LXDE Previews Port From Gtk+ 2 to Qt 136
An anonymous reader writes "As the PCMan at the LXDE blog lets us know, the work on a port of LXDE to the Qt platform is showing promise. As the developers stand to face the deprecation of Gtk+ 2, migrating away from the popular toolkit will soon be necessary. The developers note that migration to Qt 'will cause mild elevation of memory usage compared to the old Gtk+ 2 version,' but clarify that a similar increase in resource usage is expected of a migration to Gtk+ 3. Yet, the port to Qt is ongoing, and clearly taking shape, as the screenshot shows. An official release might be a while, though. As an update to the post notes, the plan is to use the recently released Qt 5.1 in the future, which we might not see in distros for some time."
They are also cooperating with the Razor Qt desktop. From the weblog post: "...We subscribed razor-qt google groups and discussed about possible cooperation earlier. Currently, the ported LXDE components are designed with Razor-Qt in mind. For example, PCManFM-Qt and LxImage-Qt will reads razor-qt config file when running in razor-qt session. We’ll try to keep the interchangeability between the two DEs. Further integration is also possible. Actually, I personally am running a mixed desktop with LXDE-Qt + Razor-Qt components on my laptop. Components from the both DE blends well."
Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:5, Informative)
XFCE is doing fine with the transition so I assume it wasn't too much of a problem. Also I quoted the guy who made the switch for LXDE and he didn't mention that issue. He mostly thinks that GTK3 is the same weight at Qt and since he liked Qt better once they were the same weight it became the better choice. Since GTK3 isn't that similar to 2 it was roughly an equal porting effort and that's why he switched.
Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The only thing missing... (Score:5, Informative)
Most importantly, the KDE community, way back when Nokia bought Trolltech, has managed to get in the contract a clause (still valid under Digia ownership) that says if Nokia/Digia doesn't release new versions of Qt under a free license (currently it is - to correct you a bit there - under the LGPLv2.1) for 12 months, then everything is automatically given to the community under a BSD license.
http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:4, Informative)
Can you give a reference to where you found that GTK 3.x wouldn't provide backwards compatibility?
Sure. I strongly recommend clicking on this link [gnome.org] from the summary, where you will find this sentence in the first paragraph: "GTK+ 3 is a major new version of GTK+ that breaks both API and ABI compared to GTK+ 2.x." It then goes on to discuss in more detail the changes that will break compatibility.
Re:The only thing missing... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't have anything against Qt, but what makes you think that it "won"? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major open source desktop applications that use Qt (other than those bundled with KDE). They all use GTK+: Firefox, LibreOffice, Chrome(ium), Gimp, Gnome, Eclipse and every Java app that uses SWT (and every Java app that uses Swing emulates GTK+ not Qt).
VLC media player is qt-based
And this other is less known but even more impressive, Velneo: www.velneo.com It's a RAD tool, where the awesome productivity is cross platform.
Check a full-fledged ERP, running i Android http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXluV5jvmc0 [youtube.com] The very exact set of advanced corporate features are available in Windows, MacOSX, Linux and Android. In the video, it is shown accessing a remote database in realtime. I tested it on my own, you develop once, and you don't have to know anything advanced about Windows, Android, MacOSX or Linux, to run the software you developed in such OS.
The power of Qt is noticeable in Velneo, and I talk after a decade and half of experience in software development, including using mainstream development tools.