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LXDE Previews Port From Gtk+ 2 to Qt

Posted by Unknown on from the long-live-trolltech dept.

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."

15 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Why QT over GTK 3 ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? by jbolden · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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++.

    2. Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? by jbolden · · 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.

    3. Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I can tell you why I wouldn't.......

      Both QT and GTK3 are fine GUI development environments. However, the GTK team doesn't have a commitment to maintaining backwards compatibility, which means if you write your code for GTK3, you can expect to rewrite it in a few years, with little real benefit. When choosing between two decent platforms, why not choose the platform that is more stable?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    4. Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? by sidthegeek · · Score: 3, Informative

      PCMan is the original author of LXDE.

    5. Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? by phantomfive · · Score: 3, 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 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.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Re:The only thing missing... by interval1066 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
  3. Re:The only thing missing... by RedHackTea · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Here's a good history by RMS: http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2000090500121OPLFKE. 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.

    --
    The G
  4. Pissing Contest By Users by tuppe666 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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/, k3b http://www.k3b.org/ (although not in development for a while), MP3 Diags http://mp3diags.sourceforge.net/ and of course Clementine http://www.clementine-player.org/about. There are a few programs that can run either that I use Transmission http://www.transmissionbt.com/ and Avidemux http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ . 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.

  5. Re:The only thing missing... by Anonymous Coward · · 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

  6. Re:The only thing missing... by Joe+Tie. · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Everything will be taken away from you.
  7. Re:The only thing missing... by afgam28 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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).

  8. Re:Hmmmmmmmmm by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I already have QT and such installed on my LXDE machine due to a couple of KDE apps I fell in love with. They work fine under Openbox/LXDE, so shouldn't be much of a problem to convert over to the new QT based DE.

    The problem isn't running QT based apps under Openbox/LXDE. The problem is rewriting LXDE componets to use QT to draw to the screen instead of GTK2. They are basically rewriting the panels and all the other components to call QT libraries instead of GTK2 libraries.

  9. Re:The only thing missing... by darthium · · 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 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.

  10. Re:The only thing missing... by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Funny

    Not if you want things like menus and buttons, which I've heard Firefox has.

    I heard the next version will be removing the last of them, since they confuse users.