aqtinstall

I've used aqt[1] before but it doesn't look like it's seeing 5.15.11 yet, just 5.15.2. [1]: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

I mostly disagree. Like you said, Qt is the best cross-platform native-like GUI toolkit available today. And that is a hard achievement. There are many tradeoffs (some you pointed out) but the open source community seems to find a way around those limitations. There are thousands of open source libraries you can plug-in into your Qt app to overcome many of its limitations (although some remain, like how can't we still not easily change caret/cursor color of QTextEdit??). Unlike you, I like the direction that Qt is taking. I think QML and Qt Quick are great. I just implemented a feature in my note-taking app that turns Markdown text into Kanban board using QML and the experience has been great (https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/pull/574). I'm planning to continue transition from QWidgets to QML/Qt Quick. I do worry of the continuous fri

https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall will help you with that.

you can install it from vcpkg or conan (or https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall if you really want the official Qt binaries) and it'll be much less

Just recently, I had to recompile a (singleplayer) save game editor. So basically a GUI that does some clever hex editing. It was written in C++ using Qt. Have you ever tried compiling a Qt program on Windows? It involves signing up for an official Qt developer account to even install qmake. To the point I had to use an unofficial Qt installer CLI app (aqtinstall) [0] to even install the toolchain to build this little shitty app... which still relied on having several Qt .dll files in the same directory as the .exe to work. Have you clicked on [0] yet? Well, then guess what programming language aqtinstall uses. [0] https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall

I'll be honest I don't think that doing C++ on windows is a good idea. The language needs to do a lot of file access for includes, and on NTFS those are super slow, my builds on Linux are something like 1/3 of the time on windows (building the same software with the same commit of clang 12 and lld, same computer, same SSD). But if you don't want to install a Linux partition, then just use aqt to install Qt: https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall You want win64_msvc2019_64 as a platform. Way too often I see everyone clicking on everything in the installer which amounts to a 30gb download, but for the immense majority of Qt apps you just want the core libs for your platform which is like a couple hundred megabytes (and even then in practice you're going to use only a small part of those unless you have uncommon needs such as serial port, mod