14 DAY TRIAL // After months of hard work, today, March 16, 2016, Digia has announced the general availability of the final Qt 5.6 production version for all supported platforms.
Qt 5.6 is a major release that introduces dozens of new features, as well as improvements to existing functionality, and let's not forget about the countless bug fixes, but the most prominent of them all is LTS. Yes, you're reading it right, Qt 5.6 is a long-term support release.
Of course, this means that the Qt 5.6 series will receive security updates and bug fixes through point releases for the next three years. Qt 5.6 also replaces the previous LTS release of the project, Qt 4.8, which benefited from four years of support. End of life for the Qt 4.8 was reached on December 19, 2015.
"With Qt 5.6, we feel comfortable offering this long-term commitment. We have had a tremendous amount of changes and improvements since the initial release of Qt 5, making Qt 5.6 a very good and solid basis to base your projects on," said Lars Knoll, Qt Chief Architect/Maintainer at Digia.
What's new in Qt 5.6
Prominent new features of Qt 5.6 include support for High-DPI (HiDPI) displays on all platforms, rebase of the Qt WebEngine to Chromium 45, full support for Windows 10, Qt Virtual Keyboard improvements, as well as embedded Linux development on a Windows host.
Additionally, Qt 5.6 ships today Qt for Device Creation, a new project that lets developers quickly get started with Qt on a development board. The STL and C+11 compatibility has been improved as well, and it looks like Qt 5.6 no longer has a 32-bit Linux installer.
Among other things worth mentioned is the fact that the Qt 5.6 series will be the last to work without needing a C++11 compliant compiler. You can download Qt 5.6.0, the first release in the series, right now for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems via our website.