"KDE 4 is coming. It's starting to look and behave in a mature enough manner to use it on a normal desktop. This article is a little introduction as to what you should expect from the brand new KDE that is due out later this year." Lots of screenshots too.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-07
Which is why Qt is mostly used by companies that want to deliver on Windows and probably OS X as well.
Doing multiplatform right away is magnitudes cheaper than having different code bases for different platforms or, in the worst case, even having different development teams.
It's interesting that despite the claim of prohibitive licencing costs, some companies use Qt even in such unfortunate situations for just the Linux/Unix "port", e.g. Opera, Skype.
Member since:2005-10-18
Which is why Qt is mostly used by companies that want to deliver on Windows and probably OS X as well.
Exactly!
It's interesting that despite the claim of prohibitive licencing costs, some companies use Qt even in such unfortunate situations for just the Linux/Unix "port", e.g. Opera, Skype.
Is it true that Opera and Skype uses Qt just for Linux and not for Windows? That would be strange, I thought otherwise. Can you cite some references? But at least regarding Opera - it was paid-for and not really cheap (for a browser, for Christ's sake), which only supports my take on the problem.
If you already have healthy sales of your Qt software on Windows/OS X (or at least a promising market for it), adding Linux port is not a big additional investment, and neither is it a big risk per se.
Member since:2006-03-23
Member since:2005-10-18
Member since:2005-09-21
i don't think that's true. I do some custom software development on the side, and I know that my last two project's wouldn't have been possible without Qt. Sure, I could have used GTK, but it would have taken far longer (all the advanced functionality I need is in Qt and not in GTK) and I would have to charge far more (since I'm charging per hour). I doubt if I could have made the sale had I quoted twice my price (these are small < $5000 contracts). For those, I used the open source version of Qt, because it really didn't make a difference to me or my client. Now I've got a bigger contract, and I'm buying a license to Qt. As a small business, I only pay around $1100 for a Qt license. That's about 20 hours of work, and I have saved probably 10 times that by going with Qt instead of a different toolkit. The GraphicsView framework, sqlite interface, network and xml functionalities in Qt have saved me countless hours already. It is easily worth it for me, and I really don't make much money on software. For a real business, it will be even more worthwhile.
Member since:2005-09-27
Member since:2005-10-18
Member since:
2005-10-18
Regarding GTK+ licensing, I guess we've discussed it before, but I'll repeat that GTK+ allows creating moderately advanced GUI apps and selling them cheap and in low volume. Not so with Qt - with its hefty licensing fees, you're either not cheap anymore or gotta sell much more copies to recoup the investment. And since the market for proprietary software is not very big in Linux, this is riskier.