[Interest] Is there a good alternative to the QML Controls in Qt6 for native desktop integration purposes?

Tue Feb 22 02:34:45 CET 2022

On Tue, Feb 22, 2022 at 12:51 AM Michael Jackson <
mike.jackson at bluequartz.net> wrote:

> So I’ll throw my 2 cents worth of experience into the ring.
>
>
>
> I’ve developed a desktop application using Qt Widgets since 2009 era. Last
> year we got funding to completely rewrite it from the ground up. We
> selected QML over widgets because we wanted that forced Model-View-Delegate
> and separation of the back end from the front end. QML sure looked
> promising from the demos. The early prototypes were nice. What we got for
> development is a hot mess. The QML debugger is a joke. GammaRay helps here
> and there trying to figure out what rectangles are where. The development
> time is horribly long. QML itself is just a black-magic soup where you
> never really know when things are getting initialized. We were hoping to
> have a flashy desktop application, all “modern” and everything. We are
> months behind schedule at this point. We spend hours messing with QML
> trying to get it to behave appropriately (sizing, visual style) where
> widgets would have just been “done”. We spent a large chunk of cash paying
> someone to get a TreeView working since Qt5 doesn’t supply one (Don’t get
> me started on that.. ).
>
>
>
That sounds like a rough time and a developer nightmare.
While I don't have that experience (porting from QWidgets to QML), I do
have the experience from QML (Qt 5.x) with Controls V1 to Controls V2 in Qt
6.
The experience there is that components with the same names - making you
think you can easily port - have wildly different properties and in general
work just completely different.

Another annoyance are the component defaults. Those defaults are definitely
not suitable for desktop usage. Properties like selecting text or even
being able to edit it are off by default.
Need mouse support to select text?... You might or might not be able to
enable it. For a TextField you can enable it. For a SpinBox you can't
enable it at all. And there's so much more like this.

> Had I known back then what I know **now** I would never have selected QML
> over Widgets for Desktop development. In no way is it ready for anything
> past some trivial applications. Not even close. The idea is great. The
> vision is cool. Our development experience has not been a good one.
>

>
> @Mark Gaiser <markg85 at gmail.com> one of our contractors implemented some
> code up in main.cpp where we press “F7” and the app reloads using the QML
> files from disk. This helps us cycle the theme updates and QML updates
> instead of having to quit and restart each time.
>
>
>
But... I thought one of the big selling points for QML was - when it first
got introduced - that it had live updating capabilities.....
I never used it but I thought it was a unique selling point.

> --
>
> Michael Jackson | Owner, President
>
>       BlueQuartz Software
>
> [e] mike.jackson at bluequartz.net
>
> [w] www.bluequartz.net
>
>
>
>
>
> On 2/21/22, 6:34 PM, "Interest on behalf of Mark Gaiser" <
> interest-bounces at qt-project.org on behalf of markg85 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 11:11 PM Bernhard Lindner <
> private at bernhard-lindner.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> QML is nice for basic applications but widgets is important for
> professional, technical
> and high-density applications.
>
> But that doesn't matter. From my point of view Qt stopped being developed
> as a desktop
> framework a long time ago. Other industries seems to have priority now.
>
>
>
> Well, it was nearly good enough in the Qt5 days with Controls V1.
>
> All they needed was a better set of controls to accommodate mobile more
> and reduce complexity in V1.
>
>
>
> What they did - conceptually - with V2 was good.
>
> But it seems like they just left it in alpha quality and call it "ok" to
> replace V1.. That was a mistake.
>
> It needed much more development time to be a proper replacement.
>
>
>
> We're now like ~8 years past the introduction of the V2 set...
>
> And it still has really severe bugs that just interrupt usability. 8
> years...
>
> So I doubt it will be getting any better at all.
>
>
> On Mo, 2022-02-21 at 16:42 +0100, Mark Gaiser wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm facing so many bugs in QML Controls in Qt6 (they used to be Controls
> V2 in the Qt 5.x
> > days) that I don't want to use them at all anymore. They are bugged
> beyond repair and
> > downright unusable for native desktop integration purposes.
> >
> > Is there another good open source component set out there that
> integrates with the
> > desktop. Specifically with Windows but preferably also with Linux (kde
> and gnome) and Mac.
> >
> > Using QWidgets should not be an alternative as it slows down development
> a lot. But given
> > the crap that QML Controls is makes me consider switching to QWidgets
> instead.
> >
> >
> > Best regards,
> > Mark
> > _______________________________________________
> > Interest mailing list
> > Interest at qt-project.org
> > https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest
>
> --
> Best Regards,
> Bernhard Lindner
>
> _______________________________________________
> Interest mailing list
> Interest at qt-project.org
> https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest
>
> _______________________________________________ Interest mailing list
> Interest at qt-project.org https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/interest/attachments/20220222/f2461afc/attachment.htm>