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Wireshark Switches To Qt
An anonymous reader writes "Beginning with version 1.11.0, open source packet analyzer Wireshark is switching its user interface library from GTK+ to Qt. 'Both libraries make it easy for developers [to] write applications that will run on different platforms without having to rewrite a lot of code. GTK+ has had a huge impact on the way Wireshark looks and feels and on its popularity but it doesn't cover our supported platforms as effectively as it should and the situation is getting worse as time goes on.'"
I can't say that I really mind. I like to try to use mostly GTK based apps but it still falls down to the quality of the app. I use qBittorrent as my Torrent client because it works better than Deluge or any other GTK client I've found. Particularly when set to the same theme QT is just fine.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
VLC, Maemo, TwimGo, LXDE; I for one would like to see a future where GIMP is the only major application left using GTK. Poetic justice.
What exactly are you concerned about them loosing? Maybe some horrible monster they've been keeping in their basement? Or a bio-genetic plague?
This is a big win for the Qt ecosystem. Between KDE libraries reworked into portable Qt modules and official iOS and Android support even with support from Digia-- Qt is gaining momentum. They even managed to survive being gobbled by Nokia, then being sold to Digia-- it has been a bumpy ride.
I recently tried out the latest Kubuntu and have been loving it installed on an old Dell D410 (12inch, 1.8Ghz SC Pentium, 1.5G RAM) laptop and it runs well and does everything I need (which in this case is Qt related application development :-)
That's not what I meant.
There you go, "Gnome" with all your bullshit misunderstanding of how a GUI is intended to look like. Go Qt!
Gtk used to stand for the gimp toolkit, but more and more it's the gnome toolkit. I wouldn't be surprised to see it merged into the gnome framework entirely at and future date. Even the mailing list is now renamed to gnome-list.
It's still a great toolkit, and still somewhat cross-platform. It's still being actively worked on on Windows and Mac osx. But with the focus mainly on gnome and Linux (gnome 3 has little support for other platforms now) they are not as advanced or stable ports.
I think wireshark's move to qt is a good one. Will definitely lead to better apps on Windows and Mac.
When last I heard, a few years ago, QT had been acquired by Nokia. More recently, it seems that Nokia is being acquired by the borg(Microsoft).
It would seem that QT is to be owned by Microsoft. Is this correct? If so, what does that hold for QT? I realize that QT is LGPL or some such, but that doesn't mean that Microsoft won't ruin it or snuff it out. See Oracle and MySQL for a road map. Hopefully I am wrong.
Fortunately, yes, you are wrong. Digia bought the business side of Qt from Nokia in 2012. The free-software side of Qt is the Qt Project.
GTK+ was outrageously superior to anything out there about 5 years ago and today it's a declining community without clear goals and without strong support from developers that need this kind of library. I don't fully understand all the details that make this happened, but I clearly remember that about 2 or 3 years ago, something changed radically when Nokia changed the Qt license and when the Gnome leaders started to act against there own community with the suicidal Gnome 3 project.
There nothing to hope when a few peoples take the power to deny the criticisms from a large part of there community. The community simple change to get away from the toxic. That's the strong power of the open source, and it's a shame that leaders from leading open source project don't understand that simple rule.
In a ideal world GTK+ and QT should have merged there most valuable features in a new neutral project as soon as QT was fully open source. Real developers don't car about the name of the project as long as the quality and the community are driving the project up to the edge of there expectations.
i met digia guys in tallinn last year at akademy (kde conference), they gave me a free t-shirt. seemed nice =)
Rich