[Interest] My first 5 years with Qt and 2 suggestions

[Jason H]

> Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2019 at 8:09 PM
> From: "Henry Skoglund" <fromqt at tungware.se>
> To: interest at qt-project.org
> Subject: [Interest] My first 5 years with Qt and 2 suggestions
>
> Hi, 5 years ago I started with Qt, it's been a very nice ride, thank 
> you! Looking forward to the next 5. Got 2 suggestions:
> 
> 
> 1) Make Qt more easily accessable for first timers:

"Skip" appears if there is no data, Qt will repopulate if appropriate data is found, this changes the default of "Skip" to "Login"

> 2) Improved Qt DLL morphology: for a given DLL, today we have very 
> coarse naming schemes, it's either Qt4Core.dll, Qt5Core.dll or 
> Qt6Core.dll (and similar namings on the other platforms).

Windows invented the whole SXS scheme to deal with that. *shrug*

---

Anyway, if you want to make Qt more accessible ("accessible" is worth some words) Qt should make QML an open JS Framework for general web development, since JS is making inroads to local apps faster than anything else. At which point moving to Qt is just ditching Chrome or Webkit and bundling the Qt Scenegraph-based runtime, with the advantage of not being sandboxed and direct access to hardware (Though efforts are there to reduce this penalty on browsers.)

Now as for "accessible", we're dealing with developers who will have to know/learn C++, and the Qt Meta Object Compiler if they do any project of sufficient complexity, so I'm not sure a lack of a "Skip" button in the installer is going to turn people away. But I think there is a kernel of something there. For me, this would be that the Qt license has been the subject of FUD from the earliest days, continuing even up to today. Though I understand why this is, (Qt Company wants to make money) I don't like it, and I think it preemptively turns people away. I think the issue should have been settled when Qt got LGPL'd. However I admit I am not the one to know exactly where the balance point is between being profitable and popular. Additionally attempting to bundle services like qt.io cloud services rather than be cloud platform agnostics (cross-cloud platform) I think also limited Qt. It should be that the Amazon, Google, and and Azure clouds are interchangeable for cloud service providers.

I've griped about Qt's priorities in the past:
1. Automotive seems to be driving these days, driving 3D (which I will never use)
2. Mobile is a 3rd rate citizen whose Qt feature set lags behind much younger projects like ReactNative. This could have been a huge and easy win because this is a cross-platform scenario that Qt was ideal for and exploded in the past 10 years, so many potential new licensees, but Qt continues to lag. Qt is conceding ground to what I consider inferior toolkits.