Qt6 status in conda-forge
Qt6 has quietly become a first-class citizen in conda-forge. The recent addition of the Qt Designer Python plugin (libpyqt6.so) to the pyqt6 package closed one of the last gaps in the PyQt6 story, but it is a small piece of a much larger, multi-year community effort. This post takes the opportunity to lay out what the whole Qt6 ecosystem now looks like on conda-forge.
The migration spans more than three years. It started with the first attempts at a 6.x build in qt-main-feedstock#44 (2022), gathered urgency once Qt 5.15 reached end-of-life in May 2025, and culminated in the "flip" that made Qt6 the default — the qt6 branch was merged into main in August 2025 (qt-main-feedstock#350). PyQt6 followed in February 2026 (pyqt-feedstock#162), and qt6-webengine landed in May 2026 (qt-webengine-feedstock#90), removing the last major blocker tracked in qt-main-feedstock#349.
A slimmer qt6-main
The most important design decision behind this work is invisible to most users: qt6-main was deliberately slimmed down. Upstream's qt-everywhere source bundles dozens of submodules, and the old approach of shipping them all in one package made the base download enormous and pulled heavy, rarely-needed components (a whole Chromium, GPU/3D stacks, multimedia codecs) into every Qt install.
Instead, the modules were broken out into separate feedstocks, each producing its own qt6-* package version-locked to qt6-main. The split was driven as much by license hygiene as by size: most of Qt is LGPL, but a few modules (notably Qt Charts, which is GPLv3) would otherwise taint the base package. Keeping qt6-main cleanly LGPL is a recurring constraint — even GPL-encumbered optional dependencies like MySQL were pushed out of the base build (qt-main-feedstock#335, qt-main-feedstock#78).
qt6-main still bundles the Qt Essentials — Core, GUI, Widgets, Network, Qml/Quick, Test, D-Bus, SQL, OpenGL, PrintSupport — plus a handful of small, universally-useful modules (SVG, image formats, shader tools, the developer tools like Designer/Linguist/Assistant, translations, Qt5Compat, WebChannel, and WebSockets). Everything heavier is opt-in.
Because Qt6 promises ABI compatibility across the whole 6.x series, packages only pin qt6-main to the major version, which keeps the dependency graph stable across minor releases.
Qt features (official Qt modules)
These are modules from The Qt Company / the Qt Project, all released in lockstep (currently 6.11.1). Install only the ones you need:
| Package | What it provides |
|---|---|
| qt6-3d | Qt 3D — near-realtime simulation and 3D rendering framework |
| qt6-charts | 2D charts (line, bar, pie, scatter, …) — shipped separately partly because it is GPLv3 |
| qt6-datavis3d | 3D data visualization (bar, scatter, surface graphs) |
| qt6-graphs | Newer unified 2D/3D graphing module |
| qt6-gtk-platformtheme | GTK3 platform theme plugin for a native GTK look on Linux |
| qt6-main | The Qt Essentials base bundle (Core, GUI, Widgets, Network, Qml/Quick, Test, SQL, OpenGL, …) plus SVG, image formats, dev tools, translations, Qt5Compat, WebChannel, WebSockets |
| qt6-multimedia | Audio/video playback, recording, and camera access |
| qt6-networkauth | OAuth-based authorization to online services |
| qt6-positioning | Positioning, satellite info, and area monitoring |
| qt6-quick3d | High-level API for 3D content/UIs on top of Qt Quick |
| qt6-scxml | State machines from SCXML files |
| qt6-sensors | Access to device sensor hardware |
| qt6-serialport | Hardware and virtual serial port access |
| qt6-wayland | Wayland compositor framework and platform integration (Linux) |
| qt6-webengine | Chromium-based web content rendering/embedding (the long-awaited piece, added May 2026) |
Community features (third-party Qt6 libraries)
These packages also start with qt6 but are independent open-source projects built for Qt6, not part of an official Qt release:
| Package | What it is |
|---|---|
| qt6-keychain | Platform-independent API for securely storing passwords (QtKeychain) |
| qt6-advanced-docking-system | Advanced Docking System for dockable UI panels |
| qt6molecularnetwork | Graph-visualization widgets used by MetGem |
Python bindings
conda-forge ships three complementary ways to use Qt6 from Python:
| Package | What it is |
|---|---|
| pyside6 | The Qt Company's official "Qt for Python" bindings |
| pyqt6 | Riverbank Computing's PyQt6 bindings (with pyqt6-sip, and add-ons such as pyqt6-charts) |
| qtpy | A compatibility shim that lets a single codebase target PyQt5, PySide2, PyQt6, and PySide6 |
Shipping both PySide6 and PyQt6, plus qtpy to abstract over them (and their Qt5 predecessors), means downstream projects can pick the binding that fits their licensing and feature needs without rewriting their code. For source-editor components, qscintilla2 is also available.
The Qt Designer Python plugin that prompted this post is now included in pyqt6 (pyqt-feedstock#184), so PyQt6 widgets show up in Designer's widget box.
A note on naming
The package names carry history. The original qt feedstock now ships a Qt5 metapackage (qt → qt-main 5.15); qt-main-feedstock builds qt-main (Qt5) on its qt5 branch and qt6-main (Qt6) on main. Encoding the major version into the package name (qt6-main) is what lets Qt5 and Qt6 coexist across the ecosystem during the long transition. See qt-main-feedstock#349 for the wrap-up plan.
What remains
- PyQt6 WebEngine —
qt6-webenginenow exists, but the PyQt6 WebEngine bindings are not yet packaged. PySide6 includes WebEngine support today, so projects needing web content from Python can use PySide6 (orqt6-webenginedirectly).
Thanks
Thanks to everyone who has worked on the Qt6 transition over the years: @hmaarrfk, @jschueller, @h-vetinari, @traversaro, @andfoy, @Tobias-Fischer, @JarrettSJohnson, @ccordoba12, @ludmilaklenova, and many others.