| Guided reading | Ubuntu developer and contributor Simon Quigley recently suggested removing Qt 4 support from the Ubuntu Linux operating system's repositories, following in the footsteps of Debian GNU/Linux. |
Since Qt 5 is largely adopted by Qt application developers and other major projects such as the KDE Plasma desktop environment, more and more GNU/Linux distributions are planned to be removed from software repositories as Qt 4 technology is outdated completely removed.
The Qt/KDE team at the Debian Project has prepared to remove Qt 4 support from the repositories for the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system series, mainly because it's getting harder and harder to maintain it now that it's no longer Supported upstream and can cause a lot of problems system-wide.
"Currently Qt 4 has stalled upstream, and we're starting to have issues maintaining it, for example in OpenSSL 1.1 support cases," Simon Quigley said in the bug report. "New packages entering the Ubuntu archives should not depend on qt4-x11 or any package that directly or indirectly depends on it."
Currently, there are over 330 packages marked for removal if they are not upgraded to a new version based on the Qt 5 framework. The team is also cleaning up obsolete packages that aren't being maintained as we speak. Among the more well known ones are LibreOffice, LightDM and all KDE 4 libraries.
All application maintainers are forced to port their packages to Qt 5
This is a requirement for developers to directly or indirectly port Qt 4 applications or any other packages that depend on qt4-x11 to the latest Qt 5 framework, which is fully supported by current and future versions of Ubuntu. Developers had to upload the Qt 5 version of their app to the development build before Ubuntu 19.04.
Currently, Canonical is preparing to release the seventh LTS (Long Term Support) release, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), which will still support Qt 4 applications, especially many Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users plan to upgrade, but Ubuntu 18.10 is probably the first release without Qt 4 support.
Of course, the removal of Qt 4 support will have a bigger impact on Ubuntu flavors like Kubuntu or Lubuntu Next, as they rely more on Qt/KDE technology than Ubuntu with GTK+ based GNOME. But this is a very good move as the Linux world always needs to adapt to new and more powerful technologies.
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