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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."

5 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."
  2. 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