The thing to note here is that the stripped out the windowing system implementation for embedded machines. So if you're using framebuffer without X11 or Wayland you're on your own for windowing now, which was previously provided in Qt4.

That's my understanding at least, I don't use Qt on embedded platforms though, can anyone confirm this?

I don't work on embedded platforms, but it seems Qt5 supports directfb, which can do windowing.

http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/embedded-linux.html http://stackoverflow.com/a/21489384/331041

That's my understanding as well. I haven't looked deep enough into the QPA stuff to understand it.