Wait, the non-OpenGL renderer for Qt Quick was commercial-only? You literally had to pay them $$$ if you wanted to develop a modern Qt app that actually worked if OpenGL wasn't available or functional (which it far too often isn't)? That's ridiculous. And even now it's only available under the GPLv3, which means that if you need to use any non-GPL-compatible code you have to pony up - and also means that distros probably can't safely ship it.
Yeah it's really bad. I feel for anyone that has stuck with these old-school 'cross-platform toolkits' over the last few years, they have really been missing out for a while now. On top of this, the whole scene is just stagnant and decades out-of-date from my experience (trying to get into Qt a couple of years ago). There are no devs there, you're basically on your own.
If you want to make cross-platform desktop apps (with opportunities for mobile too), I'd recommend hiring people who know web-dev and start looking at Electron [0] and NW.js [1]. Then you can tap into the web ecosystem with its (enormous, company-backed) massively vibrant frameworks, libraries, tools and communities.
It really doesn't make sense to use things like Qt, wxWidgets, GTK anymore (opinion - willing to be proved wrong).
I think you are wrong on pretty much everything you've stated here.
> There are no devs there, you're basically on your own
There is an extremely active mailing list and IRC channel (several official ones actually) where you can almost always get in touch with the actual Qt devs and others who use it for support without paying them anything. There are over 500 people in the IRC room right now.
> If you want to make cross-platform desktop apps (with opportunities for mobile too), I'd recommend hiring people who know web-dev and start looking at Electron [0] and NW.js [1].
Maybe when Web Assembly (or whatever its called) becomes a thing performance will be tolerable but I have yet to come across a web application that doesn't run incredibly slowly. I use Atom for a basic code viewer right now and it is pathetically slow compared to any native applications (GEdit, Kate, Geany, etc)... and this is on a desktop machine. I can't imagine anyone creating a remotely complex web application on mobile and expecting any sort of reasonable performance. Text editors should be some of the faster applications -- imagine creating something that's media rich like a music player, a video or photo editor; it would be a disaster.
Also regarding your "with opportunities for mobile too" comment, you know Qt is supported on iOS, Android, WinPho, BlackBerry, Sailfish right?
> massively vibrant frameworks, libraries, tools and communities
Yeah, its not like the native software community doesn't have that or anything. Unlike web tools, native tools have been developed for far longer and they are more robust and reliable.
>It really doesn't make sense to use things like Qt, wxWidgets, GTK anymore
Yes, if you don't care about performance and all the things web frameworks miss out on (how's that GL support looking? Native is getting ready to support Vulkan -- WebGL is still stuck on the ES2 equivalent) then jump on board the web app hype train.
You're also completely overlooking embedded where Qt specifically is used extensively. Kiosks, IVIs, small displays for smart appliances, etc.
I don't like the Qt model of using the GPL as a way to get people to go for their very expensive commercial offering and I think a model like Unreal Engine's (give us a share of your revenue) makes more sense as an additional option for smaller devs.
Technically, every distro that ships KDE or any other Qt Quick application that uses SSL is, though one would hope there's an exception for those. Beyond that, who knows? Someone would have to do an audit.
