[Interest] Is there a good alternative to the QML Controls in Qt6 for native desktop integration purposes?

[Nyall Dawson]

On Fri, 25 Feb 2022 at 01:40, Volker Hilsheimer <volker.hilsheimer at qt.io> wrote:

>  My question to you is: how can we make it easier, or more fun, or more motivating to contribute to Qt, and to help with making things better?

Speaking from my personal perspective:

The situation with the open source releases and the new LTS update
policy is the #1 thing holding me back from contributing to Qt.  I
just can't justify the time investment required to fix bugs in Qt if
I'll only see the benefit of those fixes in 12+ months time, when the
applications I use have been ported to Qt 6.

Speaking from a downstream project's perspective:

I'm heavily involved in the QGIS application
(https://qgis.org/en/site/), which is an open-source GIS based on Qt.
The QGIS project has a good history of contributing fixes to Qt for
issues which impact us -- we contract out to KDAB to implement these
fixes on our behalf. Over recent years we've probably invested around
20k EUR into Qt via KDAB. I'd like to think the QGIS project is a very
well behaved open-source contributor in this regard! (And, for
reference, there's plans to invest much more heavily in the future,
especially in Qt's SVG support and QPainter framework).
Unfortunately the LTS situation has made justifying the cost of
funding these fixes difficult, as QGIS will remain on Qt 5 for the
foreseeable future. Previously we could easily demonstrate the value
of the fixes as ALL our users would (eventually!) see the fix,
regardless of whether they were on Windows/Mac or linux builds. Now
only a very tiny portion of our users receive the fixes (specifically,
those using recent Fedora releases, as Fedora have moved away from Qt
5 upstream packages to instead following the KDE maintained 5.15
fork). Our Windows, Mac and debian based users will likely never get
the fix for their Qt 5 versions.

So, please, if you want to see more community contributions you NEED
to reverse the LTS licensing situation (at least for the Qt 5.15
version).

Nyall