LWN: Comments on "Introducing Boot to Qt"

Introducing Boot to Qt

nix — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 20:10:31 +0000

From slightly later, there is the frantic squeaking of the Hardcard.

Introducing Boot to Qt

ortalo — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 15:38:54 +0000

5 1/4 floppy drive reset noise - do you remember these Apple ][ drives?

Anyone remember Qtopia?

khim — Fri, 31 May 2013 19:59:59 +0000

How do you cede control when using Boot2Qt?

The same way you cede control when you install Windows Phone or Google Play: now you need to coordinate you development with providers of the software (Microsoft and Google). Qt and Qt Creator may be free, but this new Boot2Qt is not free.

This will spare you the time, money and expertise needed to get all the individual pieces, strip down the OS, generate an image to flash onto the device, etc. and then making all those individual parts work together nicely.

This will also put your in position where you can not control release schedule and you can not change hardware as you wish. And you are limited by what proprietary license allows you to do with the result (GPL is not an option if you want to ship consumer device with MPEG4 and Netflix support).

It don't mean to say that this problem is fatal (many PC makers which ceded control to Microsoft are doing much better then PC makers which went with free Linux 10-15 years ago), but this problematic aspect must be offset by some "positive thing" - and as I've said I don't this what this "positive thing" will be.

Anyone remember Qtopia?

hunger — Fri, 31 May 2013 09:20:32 +0000

How do you cede control when using Boot2Qt? Qt is free software (GPL/LGPL or commercial licenses are available), as is Qt Creator. The Android OS base is unchanged (but stripped down), so you can get everything there for the same price (plus the work needed for the stripping) as stock android.

What you pay Digia for is the convenience of having everything packaged to work together for you, incl. all the tools being set up correctly so that you can start on _your_ application right away. This will spare you the time, money and expertise needed to get all the individual pieces, strip down the OS, generate an image to flash onto the device, etc. and then making all those individual parts work together nicely.

Introducing Boot to Qt

akeane — Tue, 28 May 2013 01:08:51 +0000

But what could be more beautiful then dmesg output?

Anyone remember Qtopia?

rsidd — Sun, 26 May 2013 01:47:09 +0000

Did I say boot-to-qt will 'win'? I don't argue against strawmen, sorry. Your argument over 'phone' and 'smartphone', when we were already talking about smartphone platforms, equally shows you want to make silly points rather than have an actual discussion.

Anyone remember Qtopia?

khim — Sat, 25 May 2013 18:25:51 +0000

A phone that boots in 5 seconds would have a market.

Phone? Why you need anything like this on a phone? If you mean smartphone then this ship already sailed. FirefoxOS or Tizen have [small] chance: they are supported by carriers, end-user phones will finally arrive soon, but this thing... it's just too late.

If it shows a noticeable improvement in performance of apps, so much the better.

Not if there are just a small handfull of apps (see Windows Phone which still have this problem even if they spent literally billions trying to mitigate that problem).

Much depends on the pricing: if the phone itself costs $20-$30 (actually, a decent Android phone costs at least $100 even if it comes from the cheap Chinese makers) then an additional $5 may be worth it, an additional $20 won't.

When I've said $20-$30 I meant price of the underlying SOC, not about price of the whole phone. The phone itself will be priced at around $50-$100 today and the difference of $5 which can be had by switching from Android to "Boot to Qt" is already hard to justify. It'll be priced even cheaper tomorrow, difference in price will be even smaller (price of the LCD does not depend on the size of RAM, you know) and it'll make even less sense.

It's OS/2 story all over again: when OS/2 was introduced in 1992 it and most it's competitors (things like DESQview/X or NeXTSTEP) really needed whopping 8MiB to be usable while Windows 3.1 worked just fine with 4MiB - that was big deal™ and Windows won big time. IBM spent a lot of efforts and in 1994-1995 OS/2 Warp was flying on 8MiB and was even usable on 4MiB while Windows95 was barely usable on 8MiB and really needed 12-16MiB for comfortable use. Windows won big time again because it was prettier, had more software and systems with 12-16MiB of RAM were mainstream at the time.

The same here: five or six years ago Qtopia had quite real and tangible advantage over Android - you could save big on hardware. But today this advantage is much, much smaller and disadvantages (lack of the applications and "content", lack of big name, etc) are worse. 5 second boot time is not something you can sell except maybe to handful of geeks. If Qtopia failed back then when advantages were big and disadvantages small then why do you think "Boot to Qt" will win today when the situation is reversed?

Name

rsidd — Sat, 25 May 2013 15:50:31 +0000

Certainly better than "Bootie to Cutie".

Anyone remember Qtopia?

rsidd — Sat, 25 May 2013 15:49:49 +0000

The long boot time of Android is still frustrating to many, me included. A phone that boots in 5 seconds would have a market. If it shows a noticeable improvement in performance of apps, so much the better. Much depends on the pricing: if the phone itself costs $20-$30 (actually, a decent Android phone costs at least $100 even if it comes from the cheap Chinese makers) then an additional $5 may be worth it, an additional $20 won't. If you can get a $20 phone that, for another $5, performs as well as a $100 Android phone, even better.

The big issue is, as always, apps. If you want to run Android apps, the phone must have the appropriate specs (and price). If you don't want Android apps, maybe boot-to-Qt lowers the specs, but users may complain, unless the Qt app universe expands rapidly.

Anyone remember Qtopia?

khim — Sat, 25 May 2013 08:06:01 +0000

Then what's the point? Qt is probably less resource-hungry then Android, but since you are basically cede control of your destiny to Digia... who'll want to use it? And why?

I can see niche for something like this in year 2005 when 1-2GiB of RAM (needed to power Android) was a big deal, but today... when hardware with decent support for full-blown Android in the range of $20-$30 or less... are these potential $3-$5 savings actually worth the hassle?

I think we'll see some adoption, of course, but I don't think this thing will fare any better then Qtopia: it's essentially the same thing and it'll fail for the same reason. Android is either free (if you don't play by Google's rules) or has a negative price (if you play by Google's rules and thus cede control to a large degree) while this thing always have a positive price and you have to cede control, too. Who will want that?

Anyone remember Qtopia?

csamuel — Sat, 25 May 2013 04:29:19 +0000

That appears to be correct:

http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2013/05/21/introducing-boot-to-qt-a-technology-preview/#comment-757558

@Shann: Boot to Qt package, including new tooling, components, and the integrated delivery is only available for paying customers. Qt is dual licensed, and thus also available as open-source, as well as naturally the Android base layer. The idea is that in order to get the benefits the integrated Boot to Qt package brings for embedded development, including support and services to enable Qt on your HW, there is a commercial relationship established with Digia.

Name

jzb — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:57:05 +0000

I think the name is intentional, though. I've been informed that "Qt" is supposed to be pronounced "cute" so what you have is "Boot to Cute."

Anyone remember Qtopia?

tsdgeos — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:13:56 +0000

This is not a project of the Qt community but a project from Digia, and from reading the blog i understand it's a non free.

Name

epa — Fri, 24 May 2013 06:09:13 +0000

They missed an opportunity to call it Bt to Qt.

Anyone remember Qtopia?

pabs — Fri, 24 May 2013 04:22:22 +0000

Qtopia / Qt Extended are dead but were forked by the QtMoko project. What makes this different from QtMoko is that it appears to be a project of the Qt community rather than the OpenMoko community.

Anyone remember Qtopia?

cibyr — Fri, 24 May 2013 02:14:24 +0000

What makes this different to Qt Extended / Qtopia?

Introducing Boot to Qt

dashesy — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:55:46 +0000

Those numbers are amazing, and so is Qt. Cannot wait to see Qt take over Java-bloat on my phone.