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Comment by skratlo | Hacker News Reader

There is so much bullshit and lies about Qt5, I won't bother finishing that piece of crap:

Erik Engheim: Qt5 is 5GB Actual fact (on arch linux): qt5-base = 64.07 MiB, qt5-declarative = 24.72 MiB, qt5-quickcontrols2 = 8.56 MiB

> Try having somebody look at a Qt design you made. “Oops sorry you need a 5 GB download to do that. Oh and btw you need to register an account on a website, login and search really hard to find the free version.”

...blatant lie, etc. I won't bother, this guy is nuts. Thanks god for Qt, it has its quirks but on the desktop it's the best we can do to dev cross-platform

Erik Engheim: Consider Qt Creator IDE which is quite minimalist, without Qt which it requires to run, requires over 200 MB Actual fact: 108.03 MiB

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There might be some confusion about Qt the runtime (ie: compiled binaries) and the Qt SDK for development. Last I remember (admitedly, >8 years ago) the Qt SDK certainly was a multigigabyte download.

In this case, you need the SDK to develop a UI with Qt, so I think the author's comparison is fair.

> Consider Qt Creator IDE which is quite minimalist, without Qt which it requires to run, requires over 200 MB Actual fact: 108.03 MiB

Probably depends on the platform, I wouldn't be surprised if it was > 200 MB on OS X. But either way, 100 vs 200, same order of magnitude

Yeah well, but that's because of the env. you chose to use, that qt5-base etc. I mentioned? it includes header files. Add your compiler of choice and you're good to go. I've no idea what "SDK" are you talking about, but honestly, I'm pretty sure that includes tons of documentation, images, multimedia, etc.

> Probably depends on the platform, I wouldn't be surprised if it was > 200 MB on OS X. But either way, 100 vs 200, same order of magnitude

keep in mind that Qt Creator comes with a full clang for its C++ code model which is already 40-50 megabytes at least ; no decent C++ IDE can skip that.

Regarding the Qt SDK size, what can take gigabytes is installing it for all android & iOS ... ABIs / versions.

for a fast SDK installation experience, I recommend aqtinstall:

    $ pip install aqtinstall
    $ time python -m aqt install 5.15.0 linux desktop -O ~/Qt/
    10,43s user 2,14s system 153% cpu 8,213 total
    $ du -csh ~/Qt/5.15.0
    592M 5.15.0

(but really, just install e.g. qtbase5-dev on Debian systems has 99.9% of what is needed for most GUI desktop apps and is ~13 megabytes: https://packages.debian.org/sid/qtbase5-dev what takes space is 3D engines, webviews, multimedia apis, etc... but an awful amount of apps don't need those)

Last time I downloaded it some years ago, it was only a multi gigabyte download if you selected all of the optional packages and their sources, which, if I remember correctly, included multiple versions of Qt itself. Most of this stuff is not needed.

Last time I tried programming with Qt I remember downloading in the order of Gigabytes too.

I also remember hating my computer for a while after as well

Also:

"From February onward, everyone, including open-source Qt users, will require valid Qt accounts to download Qt binary packages."

- https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020

Yes, binary packages are convenience, you could be paying for those if you're lazy to build the open source from the source.

Which is pretty cynical if you ask me, as most open source toolkits are distributed as binaries for free, to be accessible by everyone.

In the context of the situation imagined in the article, "blatant lie... guy is nuts" is over-doing it.

While "you need to download and compile the framework from source" is an option, "you need 5gb and to register an account for the download" is also a fairly plausible way to present it if that option offers time savings vs the former to the person you're hoping to review your project.

I'm reading your response as jumping to "lazy" and "cheap", which I find to be pretty uncharitable. The Qt Company is free to demand whatever they like, but nobody has to like the demands.

I don't know enough about Qt to know if you're right or wrong, but I know enough about game engines to know that whatever Qt is or isn't, it doesn't negate the usefulness of game engines.

I have written a few 3D applications in both Unity and Unreal, and I can tell you that the cross-platform build process with those is impressive. I can package an app for three different platforms and get pixel perfect equivalent output and the exact same behavior on all three platforms without any trickery at all.

Qt probably also does this, and that's great! Qt existing doesn't take away from the utility of game engines, is all, nor the reverse.

> Honestly I don’t remember much of the details of what QML was like working with. I just remember it was not as intuitive as I would have wished.

In my personal experience and opinions QML is the best domain specific language for GUI development I’ve ever used and was a dream to work with in comparison to others. Nowadays, my UIs are mainly react based web applications and I often wish I could use QML instead and dream of a warm future where I can use something like QML on web without any major tradeoffs.

So I strongly disagree with him on this point.

I can only second this. My open source side project [1] UI is written in QML. The best feature of QML is that it forces you to separate your UI and your c++ core logic.

[1]https://screen-play.app/ (Live wallpaper)

Too late to edit: WASM future

I don't understand why you've gotten upset, the author isn't lying and I also don't believe they're trying to slander Qt

I tried to install qt the other day on Ubuntu, I couldn’t find the free version. I gave up and moved on to an alternative.

Why are they shooting themselves in the foot there?

I'm 100% sure that Ubunutu has qt in its repos. Just download the *-dev package and you should be good to go.

  sudo apt install qt5-default qtcreator

There's additional packages for certain things like multimedia formats, SQL support, and other specialized components, but that gives you everything you need for Qt Gui.

I think you could add `--install-suggests` to that command if you wanted to get everything and the kitchen sink.

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