Submitted by This is a port of the QtBase module of the Qt software development framework version 5 to the OS/2 operating system (and its derivants). This port is carefully crafted and maintained by bww bitwise works GmbH (also referred as bitwiseworks).
The current version of the port implements all major parts of the QtBase module and is suitable to compile and run a large amount of Qt 5 applications on OS/2.
An impressive effort, but I do have to wonder – what is the benefit of running OS/2 when all of the applications you’re using are better served running on, I don’t know, KDE or Windows? Doesn’t it make more sense to direct effort towards native applications?
Are you serious? Writing new applications takes much, much more resources than porting existing ones. The only desktop platforms that have enough manpower to maintain their own native ecosystems are Windows, macOS and the unix-likes. OS/2 is definitely not among them.
i think the question was – what is the point of running os/2 in the first place, if the applications will perform better on something better supported.
I like it though. More qt ports means more places you can release one app codebase with not much porting.
This same question has been asked to death of Haiku which now has many QT5 applications available… its really not a very good question to begin with.
When your platform has few applications the question really is how to get enough appliactions to make it dailyable one way or another, and porting QT5 applications is a pretty obvious answer.
If writing native applications was the answer then why hasn’t it been done in the past 20 years… once a platform gains enough users and developers Native applications will be inevitable but not before.
Yeah, they really need to port Qt5 and other frameworks to AmigaOS. But then their current frameworks are really nice and fast. But as pointed out, no one wants to rewrite their software for those specifically unless the userbase is there. What would be nice is some sort of wrapper that would just convert Qt to say Reaction or MUI. Not sure how feasible that is of course.
AmigaOS is a bad target for modern software anyway… as far as I know AmigaOS still has no memory protection.
Like it or not, for end-user, non-gaming applications, new “native” desktop applications are nearly dead. Outside of specialty or legacy applications (which I admit, there are many), new applications for desktop systems seem to mostly be web applications packaged as a desktop app, or strictly web versions of applications are available for desktop use.
I have pretty mixed feelings about this. The positive side is that I can use basically any OS I want as long as it has a modern browser and I can be genuinely productive. I can communicate and work with other people and actually get stuff done. The down side of course is that the OS itself, and all of the unique aspects of that platform are never really used, never taken advantage of, and really don’t much matter. In the end, the browser has become the OS.
As a developer, I have equally mixed feelings. I like native applications as much as the next guy, but as a web developer, the allure of writing an application once and having it accessible practically everywhere (even on obscure, otherwise unsupported platforms) is just too great to ignore.
“An impressive effort, but I do have to wonder – what is the benefit of running OS/2 when all of the applications you’re using are better served running on, I don’t know, KDE or Windows?”
Right! It’s better to run programs in a Yugo (Windows) than it is run it in a Toyota (OS/2).
OS/2, for the VAST majority of cases OS/2 is far far FAR FAAAAARRRR more reliable and faster than Windows that they aren’t in the same league. When you need something to run 24 hours a day, 365 ¼ days a year without rebooting for say, five years, you can count on OS/2. Windows? Not even Microsoft would claim they can do that. And if OS/2 can do that, then I pick them any day of the week if I can run the same program on either of the OSs.
And as far as Linux, if I want to have to keep messing around with the configuration whenever I want to install something new, sure, go with Linux. Have you ever USED OS/2? I have for over two decades. Is that enough time to have a valued opinion? Oh, and yes, I support Windows, Linux Macs and OS/2. Anytime I can, I pick those in the reverse order.
Did you know that behind the scenes that the NY subways use OS/2 on all their platforms and the people that run the NY subway system will tell you that OS/2 is THE most stable and trouble free portion of that whole system.
For us its mainly cashpoints 🙂
Well I hope anyone running an OS/2 derivative at this point is using ArcaOS. Anything else is unsupported and unpatched at this point.
What I don’t understand about the premise is why run WINE on Linux then? Every platform now can run something else. QT is designed to be cross platform. Windows even has a Linux subsystem now.
Laffer1 – I kept it simple for people that don’t about anything not named OS/2 like eComStation or ArcaOS. People would say, “What is ArcaOS?:” when they know what OS/2 is.
OS/2 was made to run everything else other than OS/2 stuff. 😉
> Doesn’t it make more sense to direct effort towards native applications?
Well, I think the story goes like this:
1) Some people still use either OS/2, either because they like it, or because they are forced to by some software/hardware dependency.
2) Those people want new software, sometimes OS/2 versions of things which didn’t even exist during OS/2’s prime.
3) The native frameworks are long in the tooth and/or make porting software overly complicated
4) Porting a popular open source framework solves these problems.
One of the big drivers for this Qt5 port is that OS/2 needs a new web browser (since Firefox began to incorporate Rust code, it has become challenging to port it to non mainstream/legacy OSes) and Qt comes with its own cross-platform webkit wrapper.