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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

> I have already said it many times online. The way Qt wants to make money is too much focused in big B2B style. There is a general sentiment in the community that the current pricing is bad for small businesses. It feels like giving into a trap when using Qt for small business.

This. And might I say, a lot of IT companies in Europe are awful at pricing. They're aiming for the B2B market and forget all the others

Well guess what, people are just embedding browsers now and except for niche apps, few people care about Qt

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> Well guess what, people are just embedding browsers now

Which is incredibly selfish and hypocritical, it drives up resource consumption across the world at a massive scale. Not just in terms of energy use, but it also forces people to buy more powerful machines, intensifying electronic waste problems.

Great job guys!

I hate embedded browser UIs like electron stuff as much as you do, but you're pointing your blaming finger in the wrong direction:

What do you expect application developers to do in absence of a natively compiling cross-platform GUI lib that is both good and with a nice licensing terms (e.g. a permissive open source license)? To put their application development on ice so as to develop that (which is a huge task in itself)?

If you want this situation to change and shitty browser-based UI to not be the go-to solution (for lack of a better cross-platform alternative for application developers), then feel free to go ahead and develop a native-compiling cross-platform GUI lib that plays in the same league as Qt, and make it available under a permissive open source license (unlike Qt).

You're pretending it was impossible to make applications before electron came around.

Nah, I'm not pretending anything of the likes in any way. In fact, the overwhelming majority of apps aren't cross-platform at all, so that's really the norm, not cross-platform frameworks.

All I'm saying is that unlike the native platform-specific frameworks (which are limited to the respective platform, but which the platform vendors make available free of charge under terms favorable to commercial app development), there no cross-platform frameworks that are simultaneously good and not encumbered by totally grabastically shite licensing/pricing terms, thus naturally leading to a wide majority of application developers either going platform-specific… and a large part of the rest (i.e. those who still want to do cross-platform) going with the ugly embedded browser solution (electron and the likes).

The browser-based approach, ugly as it is, happens to unfortunately be the only cross platform solution that is not encumbered by shitty app-developer-unfriendly licensing/pricing terms. Make a good, feature-rich and comprehensive cross-platform UI framework that is suitable both for desktop and mobile applications available under a nice permissive open-source license and you'll see lots of app developers use your framework instead of reluctantly using that browser shite (electron and such).

The dilemma is: who's paying for the development? A good feature-rich comprehensive UI framework is an enormous effort (both upfront and ongoing), and recouping that enormous cost is far from obvious unless falling into one of these categories:

* Platform-specific (i.e. not cross-platform): framework development financed by big platform vendor who makes framework available for free but platform-specific, in order to push their platform and make their money with the latter

* browser based frameworks: framework development cost greatly reduced by re-using a pre-existing browser engine developed by some big player who finances browser engine development because they have a commercial interest in pushing their browser

* Choosing a license that makes the financing of the framework possible by making the app developers pay mucho money… but then it will naturally be avoided by most app developers, especially given the existence of free alternatives (which may have other disadvantages, but those are orthogonal to that problem)

* A big player subsidizing the development cost by some cross-financing from money made otherwise: that has happened for some open source software and libs in other domains, but not for a good cross-platform UI framework so far unfortunately.

This was a problem 15 yrs ago. Today it isn't.

The cheapest stuff that can run Qt is the same one that runs a basic Android install

Modern software embedding an entire web browser is absolutely & undeniably a problem.

I hear this argument often, but I haven't heard a convincing argument. Why? Lack of storage? No. Lack of computing power or RAM? No. Then?

Yes to all the above, actually. Using Electron as an example, applications are often >100MB in size, consume >100MB memory on the low end, & (subjectively) perform badly enough that I can easily feel and perceive the delay between interaction-response.

Very very wasteful.

Embedding an entire web browser is the software equivalent of shipping a tiny part in a 2 foot cube box, or putting three layers of non-recyclable packaging on vegetables.

Storage might be cheap, but storage you already have is free. I have a drawer full of old hard drives - all perfectly functional, but not useful because software footprint has exploded in recent years. Embedding a full web browser isn't the only offender, of course - the various types of container systems are another.

And that's without mentioning deployment: It's easy to take a fast, high-quality always-on internet connection for granted, but there are many, many people who don't have that, or use mobile plans with strict data limits.

>Lack of storage? No.

Why no? Not every machine is your 32GB RAM machine… If it has to run on a slower machine… say a raspberry pi with a slow flash drive and a slow external drive accessed over USB… being much smaller means speed.

> Lack of computing power or RAM? No.

Why no? Yes.

We have had multitasking operating systems for a while now. Electron apps are tolerable because they are few. If every single application was done with electron, it'd be worse than windows95 on a 486.

They still sell lots of computers with 8GB of RAM, although I'm sure your one has at least 2x, probably 4x as much.

> Then?

Then, with incorrect assumptions you can reach any result that you desire, but it is meaningless.

> If it has to run on a slower machine… say a raspberry pi with a slow flash drive and a slow external drive accessed over USB

This runs a web browser no problem. No need for 32GB of RAM

It'd be hard to find some hardware today that runs Qt and not a web browser that's significantly cheaper (and will just make your development costs higher)

Electron is an issue but nobody is using that for embedded

> Then, with incorrect assumptions you can reach any result that you desire, but it is meaningless.

Exactly

> Electron is an issue but nobody is using that for embedded

Qt works fine on embedded. Quite popular there.

> This runs a web browser no problem. No need for 32GB of RAM

Yes, 1 web browser with a minimal no js page. But 10 at the same time? 20? Animated stuff in it?

Just because you have access to powerful hardware doesn't mean others have as well. They have perfectly fine and adequate computers, until we started wrapping everything in electron.

Now they have to spend their hard-earned money, and contribute to global electronic waste and resource consumption issues, just to be able to participate in society and save face.

It's exactly your attitude that is at the root of this crisis.

It's still a problem today even if you have trained yourself to not notice it.

You're proving my point by saying "the newer, more powerful machines can run more demanding software" and not looking any further than that.

Are you saying electronic waste and increasing energy consumption aren't problems anymore?

You severely overestimate what "the cheapest stuff" (or maybe more accurate "the low-endest stuff") is.

Qt is not bad but it's also not as good as Electron. It doesn't look native (unless you're myopic), it's slower than native, it's quirky, it's buggy... it's cross-platform on paper because when you manage to build your app on another platform you'll see half of it doesn't work well... and on top of that, it costs money. A lot of money. No wonder it lost.

On one hand I understand it's good to have competition. On the other, I'm happy that bad solutions lose. That's the way of the market.

Why bring Electron? Qt doesn't look exactly native, and it is a bit slower than native, but Electron doesn't look native at all and is much slower.

Qt is kind of a middle ground between low level / native frameworks and web based interfaces like Electron.

And in the majority of the cases, it doesn't cost money. The open source version is LGPL, which means you can use it for free in proprietary software as long as you allow the user to modify the Qt library you are using (usually, in means dynamic linking).

Just release your own thing as open source, then Qt doesn't cost anything at all.

I don't think LGPL requires you to release your source code if you link dynamically and not modify the LGPL code itself.

Yes you're right. Doing it open source works but it's not even necessary.

That's one way of looking at it, but remember that Electron is better and free even if you don't release your code. On mobile, you have Flutter, React Native... In this situation, why would anybody want to go with Qt, unless they have an existing, legacy codebase? Who's starting new projects in Qt?

Electron is better if your only metric to evaluate quality is "can I use it in my proprietary product?".

I work in a company that uses electron. The amount of time the UI guys spend to reimplement things that are already in Qt is incredible (for example a portable tray icon, menus, tabbing).

Yes we are saving money on license (but spending probably much more on developers reimplementing things).

> Who's starting new projects in Qt?

People who want portability and are aware that not everybody has 32GB of RAM like their overly expensive developer machine?

People that do not feel like reimplementing things that have existed for ages is fun?

People who do open source and do not have to pay for a license, and thus have no reason to "save money" and use electron?

I second this. On the projects where I work, I see a lot of 117 reinventions of square wheels, with their accompanying bugs, for things like multi-column lists, scroll, selection models, and drop-downs. And I know we used to have those things as built-in standard-widgets, where you had to put in extra effort, in order to F them up.

I have an open bug registered on the aurelia framework concerning virtual scroll sometimes breaks when you reach the edges. The answer from the maintainer could be translated to "the guys who understood this code is no longer here". I tried to figure it out from the source code, and came to the same conclusion.

It's as if, ever since we got a full set of widgets available on desktops, we have been busy re-inventing them from scratch in other idioms (notably in the HTML DOM.)

This. It is incredibly easy to underestimate the functionality in a fully-fledged widget set, especially once you factor in accessibility integrations. UI development is 10% shiny, 90% edge-case.

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