It doesn't look too hard to remove that dependency, but then you'd have to write your own cross-platform GUI software, which might be out of scope. Might be a fun exercise though.

Why does it have to be cross platform? At this point Ladybug does not compile on Windows anyways. Also the target audience is probably mostly using Linux.

And what windowing toolkit do you think it sould use on Linux? GTK? Meh. Qt is fine and using QtWidgets is pretty far from depending on QtWebEngine.

None? Talking to bare X11 is actually pretty simple.

Don't forget that you're also expected to support Wayland nowadays on Linux.

Who is expecting Wayland support besides Redhat and Collabora?

And yes, talking to Wayland directly is extremely cumbersome and unnecessary complex. That's why nobody uses it.

Talking to bare x11 is one of the worst ways to conform to XDG desktop spec.

Well, the goal from the article is obviously to make it cross-platform, it's even in the title ;). To achieve that they just wrapped it in Qt. To replace that you'd have to achieve parity for the (admittedly smallish) subset of Qt that is being used. Starting with Linux for that would be a good start, but I'd assume the eventual goal would be to expand to other platforms as well.

It seems to compile on MacOS and Android already so not being on Windows (yet) doesn't really sidestep having a cross platform GUI/events library.

Yep. Not sure what Qt is at now, technically. But that's because when you go download it you have to click through 5 screens that threaten you that you shouldn't use the LGPL version and pay instead. I don't like being threatened so I don't check out Qt.

To the point that it's banned at my job because we're too small to have lawyers on retainer to protect us if we use the LGPL version and do too few GUI jobs to justify the licensing model for the commercial version...

If your framework of choice can implement a network request manager, a timer, and has an event loop, it's quite trivial to make it run within that framework, especially after the recent changes done by Andreas in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8lXroxngYo

I was at first excited, a new browser that isn't firefox or chrome. But then it said QT and this made me loose interest immediately.

They only use QT to display onto the screen and get user inputs (also for network requests but that's subject to change)