Qt packages built with OpenGL ES support are now available

by Dmitry Shachnev
in Planet

tagged Debian, Qt

Some time ago, there was a thread on debian-devel where we discussed how to make Qt packages work on hardware that supports OpenGL ES, but not the desktop OpenGL.

My first proposal was to switch to OpenGL ES by default on ARM64, as that is the main affected architecture. After a lengthy discussion, it was decided to ship two versions of Qt packages instead, to support more (OpenGL variant, architecture) configurations.

So now I am announcing that we finally have the versions of Qt GUI and Qt Quick libraries that are built against OpenGL ES, and the release team helped us to rebuild the archive for compatibility with them. These packages are not co-installable together with the regular (desktop OpenGL) Qt packages, as they provide the same set of shared libraries. So most packages now have an alternative dependency like libqt5gui5 (>= 5.x) | libqt5gui5-gles (>= 5.x). Packages get such a dependency automatically if they are using ${shlibs:Depends}.

These Qt packages will be mostly needed by ARM64 users, however they may be also useful on other architectures too. Note that armel and armhf are not affected, because there Qt was built against OpenGL ES from the very beginning. So far there are no plans to make two versions of Qt on these architectures, however we are open to bug reports.

To try that on your system (running Bullseye or Sid), just run this command:

# apt install libqt5gui5-gles libqt5quick5-gles

The other Qt submodule packages do not need a second variant, because they do not use any OpenGL API directly. Most of the Qt applications are installable with these packages. At the moment, Plasma is not installable because plasma-desktop FTBFS, but that will be fixed sooner or later.

One major missing thing is PyQt5. It is linking against some Qt helper functions that only exist for desktop OpenGL build, so we will probably need to build a special version of PyQt5 for OpenGL ES.

If you want to use any OpenGL ES specific API in your package, build it against qtbase5-gles-dev package instead of qtbase5-dev. There is no qtdeclarative5-gles-dev so far, however if you need it, please let us know.

In case you have any questions, please feel free to file a bug against one of the new packages, or contact us at the pkg-kde-talk mailing list.