LXDE Previews Port From Gtk+ 2 to Qt

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."

Why QT over GTK 3 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Serious question, I'm assuming that there was a specific reason for going with QT and not GTK3; anyone know why?

Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ?

[jbolden]

I don't know who "PCMan" is on the LXDE team but he is the author and here is what he wrote

I, however, need to admit that working with Qt/C++ is much more pleasant and productive than messing with C/GObject/GTK+.
Since GTK+ 3 breaks backward compatibility a lot and it becomes more memory hungry and slower, I don’t see much advantage of GTK+ now. GTK+ 2 is lighter, but it’s no longer true for GTK+ 3. Ironically, fixing all of the broken compatibility is even harder than porting to Qt in some cases (PCManFM IMO is one of them).
So If someone is starting a whole new project and is thinking about what GUI toolkit to use, personally I might recommend Qt if you’re not targeting Gnome 3.

Update 2013-03-27:
I got some feedback about the toolkit choice above. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that gtk+ is bad and did not intend to start a toolkit flame war. If you’re going to use python, C#, or other scripting language, gtk+ is still a good choice due to its mature language bindings.

Vala is attractive initially, but after trying it in real development, you’ll see the shortcomings of this approach. Because it sometimes generates incorrect C code that still compiles, we got some really hard-to-find bugs. So we need to examine the generated C code to make sure it does things right. This takes much more time than just writing plain C code myself. Besides, the generated C code is not quite human-readable and debugging becomes a problem. Another issue that’ll hit you is the problems in the library bindings. Though there exists many vala bindings for various C library, their quality is uncertain. Finally, debugging, examing, and fixing the bindings all the time takes even more time and offsets the time saved by using Vala.

To sum up, for compiled binary programs, Qt IMHO is a good choice to consider if you don’t hate C++.

Re:The only thing missing...

[cheesybagel]

Personally I hate the Qt APi. It has its uses. The cross platform capabilities are a lot better and it has a lot of functionality built-in that you can only get as separate external libraries with GTK+. But I disagree that it is better to program for. GObject may be verbose but to me the object model, class hierarchies, etc make a lot more sense.

Re:The only thing missing...

[RedHackTea]

Here's a good history by RMS: http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2000090500121OPLFKE [linuxtoday.com]. Note that since then, Qt is now under the GPL v2.1; however, because of the history, I think most developers fear tight integration with it. "Will they ever remove the GPL in a new version one day?" is the thought in some people's minds. A lot of F/OSS may sound ridiculous and like paranoia, but it's paranoia that keeps companies like Microsoft out of the OS that we geeks love so much. Having said all of this, my personal opinion is that Qt is fine now and that the paranoia is unwarranted, but it still exists.

Pissing Contest By Users

[tuppe666]

I'd like to see all Linux projects standardize on Qt as a their Gui toolkit. I understand why everyone has their own but the war is won and Qt won it.

War..Won!? All I see is healthy competition, and personally I run a whole host of Applications that I don't care what toolkit they are in. Having a look around there are some absolutely stellar QT applications http://calibre-ebook.com/ [calibre-ebook.com], k3b http://www.k3b.org/ [k3b.org] (although not in development for a while), MP3 Diags http://mp3diags.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] and of course Clementine http://www.clementine-player.org/about [clementine-player.org]. There are a few programs that can run either that I use Transmission http://www.transmissionbt.com/ [transmissionbt.com] and Avidemux http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ [fixounet.free.fr] . But the Bottom line is GTK+ seems as popular as ever, and still more popular than Qt.

What is most bizarre is this about this is LXDE is looking great, a Desktop we don't hear about often enough, and is looking like a desktop I would use...half this discussion is about lets be honest a license subtlety I don't care about.

Re:The only thing missing...

[Joe Tie.]

How many times has firefox been ported to qt at this point? I remember at least two separate times that it almost got into a usable state but was then abandoned.