[nottorp]

> At the end of the day, developers need to finance their projects. No other toolchain out there [1] is going to give you the flexibility, development speed, and freedom to develop beautiful looking desktop apps using the muscle memory you trained while writing webpages.

Why do you restrict yourself to only knowing how to write webpages?

> Of course, you can write the same application in Qt, GLFW, whatever, but I don't think anyone will disagree that it's much slower to build and prototype responsive UIs with these tools.

Maybe because you don't have the "muscle memory" to write Qt?

But since you mentioned Qt, one of the greatest hits to developing cross platform applications was the Nokia/Microsoft disaster.

Nokia bought Qt from Trolltech and made it LGPL, because their plan was to make money from the hardware not the software. Then they died, for reasons that have been commented on endlessly.

From the ashes of Nokia rose Digia or whatever it's called this week, a company that maintains Qt badly and thinks it's a good idea to threaten developers that download their LGPL product.

RIP Qt, RIP cross platform development.

[injuly]

Web programmers massively outnumber systems programmers. The market has been this way for quite some time now. I'm not a web programmer myself, at least not professionally, but it is far too easy to prototype with Electron/Electrino/Tauri/whatever than any other toolchain out there. I've used Xamarin, Qt, ImGui (not the same league, I know), and several other lower-level rendering libraries like SDL, SFML, raylib, GLFW. Nothing comes close to the vast expanse of features that CSS exposes with - often - a single attribute like `transform` or `object-fit`. Of course you can do it with any other language/framework, but it'll be dozens more lines of code. More time. This is assuming equal proficiency in both tech stacks.

JavaScript might be a disaster of a language, but it is faster to make a UI with CSS. I can totally see why startups pick web programming to ship desktop apps.

[rubymamis]

Qt is definitely not dead, rather alive and kicking. I've built my latest note-taking app[1] in Qt C++ and QML and it's been one of my best decisions. What the Qt Company need to focus on is hunting bugs (there are many of those) and reduce their license fee (at least for indie developers), it's just too expensive[2].

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

[2] https://www.qt.io/pricing

[nottorp]

Have they given up on asking you 3 times if you are absolutely truely sure that you can comply with the license terms when you download the LGPL version?

With that attitude I can't recommend it to any entity that can't afford a full time legal team.

[guappa]

If you install via apt you get no prompt whatsoever.

[nottorp]

Heh, that's not the point. I was asking if they changed their attitude towards LGPL use or not.

[rubymamis]

What's wrong with LGPL use? From what I gather, if you don't link Qt statically and don't modify Qt's source code, and your app's license doesn't impose restrictions that conflict with the LGPL, you are good to go. Most apps would fall under these criteria.

[nottorp]

Have you checked their download page? :)

https://www.qt.io/download-open-source

Here you go. Now that I looked at it, it's not only threats any more, it's a combination of threats, lies * and begging.

The point is not to discuss the properties of LGPL but Digia's attitude towards potential LGPL users.

* "In return for the value you receive from using Qt to create your application, you are expected to give back by contributing to Qt or buying Qt."

Where does the LGPL say that, I wonder?

[Gigachad]

> Why do you restrict yourself to only knowing how to write webpages?

That’s just how the market is. If you want to build your app with electron, you’ll find mountains of skilled developers everywhere. If you use QT, you’ll either have to pay an absolute fortune for the 10 people that know it, or accept hiring people that have never used it before.

[guappa]

It's not that hard to use.

Possibly easier to use a framework that includes a lot of things, rather than a language with no standard library that requires a soon-to-be-compromised dependency for every string function that QString already offers.

[nottorp]

I didn't ask why you hire, but why you knowingly restrict what you know.