Question/Bug: matplotlib Qt backend specification about yt HOT 4 CLOSED

Ok, great. Thanks for the confirmation, @neutrinoceros . And I can push up a fix later today -- I spent some time yesterday experimenting with the qt back end options in new environments and I understand it much better now.

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Is it necessary to specify a backend in general? I've heard matplotlib isn't great at finding defaults, but I know I've had to change the backend through an environment variable on at least one system to get (interactive?) plotting to work at all. If setting the backend explicitly is not necessary, maybe it would be better to let users set this if they have to, based on what works/is available on their system.

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Well it already is possible for the user to set the matplotlib backend, but internally yt tries to do its own detection in order to get the proper canvas objects (based on whatever matplotlib detects). It may be that this whole architecture could be removed or refactored, but I think that'd be a much larger refactor (throughout many of the yt plot window classes) compared to just getting the generic QtAgg backend to work.

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BACKEND_SPECS should definitely be updated in this situation. What I don't understand is why 4-years-ago me thought it was a good idea to silently swallow KeyErrors and return None... Seeing that this does causes issues, I would suggest to just drop the try/except logic.

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