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

[Narolewski Jakub]

Dear Volker,

I have always found Qt project fascinating from a technological
perspective. I enjoy using it and I will surely continue to do so. Multiple
times when I discovered that some things can be made faster, better or more
robust I felt the need to give the community something back.

Unfortunately the process of contributing code to the project feels only a
little bit better than eating glass.

This probably seems silly at best for someone how does it daily but as I
have only a limited amount of free time for 'side activities' I find it ...
demotivating.

As for how this could be improved I have honestly no idea. It would be nice
to contribute back to Qt but - for me personally - the entry barrier seems
quite high.

On Thu, 24 Feb 2022, 16:40 Volker Hilsheimer, <volker.hilsheimer at qt.io>
wrote:

> > On 22 Feb 2022, at 00:34, Mark Gaiser <markg85 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> 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.
> >>
> >> 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.
> >
>
>
> Hi All,
>
> Thanks for keeping it civilised.
>
> Yes, Qt Quick Controls - and largely the entire Qt Quick framework - were
> originally designed for mobile and embedded platforms, and indeed, that
> shows when using them for the desktop.
>
> I’m happy that at least in The Qt Company we are now in a position that
> allows us to put more focus on the desktop, and that we are are able to do
> more than maintenance and catching up with what’s happening on the
> underlying platforms. That includes the journey of making Qt Quick Controls
> a great toolkit for the desktop as well. In Qt 6 so far we have had first
> implementations of the native styles - yes, those require more work; we
> have made a number of improvements to item views, including a TreeView now
> in Qt 6.3; a first set of standard dialogs is in Qt 6.2 and more are coming
> in 6.3. We have worked on some architectural issues that are problematic on
> the desktop, such as keyboard navigation and focus handling, and there is a
> fair amount of more work needed there as well.
>
> I’m not going to claim that all things will be wonderful any moment now;
> there’s plenty of work that needs to be done. But things do get better,
> both with Qt Quick Controls, and with Qt Widgets as well.
>
> What keeps confusing me personally is how few people in the community seem
> to find it interesting to contribute to either of our UI frameworks in Qt.
> If I take one of the QtWidgets issues that came up in this thread:
> "QTBUG-6864 is 12 years old, has 47 votes”. I sat down on Tuesday evening
> to check what it would take to implement hiding of rows in a QFormLayout;
> after a few hours I had a working implementation, which is right now on its
> way into the dev branch. The hardest part, as it so often is, was writing a
> unit test.
>
> Now, I understand that not everybody finds it fun to do that kind of thing
> on a Tuesday evening. But given the apparently high interest in this
> feature, that nobody seems to have tried to give it a shot in 12 years is
> really puzzling me. When Nokia acquired Trolltech, it didn’t take a crystal
> ball to see that the focus won’t be the desktop. And one answer to this was
> to move Qt under Open Governance so that anyone could contribute to Qt and
> make sure that it stays awesome also for domains that Nokia won’t care much
> about.
>
> Evidently, the people commenting in this thread care deeply enough about
> Qt on the desktop to participate in the discussion. And I suppose most of
> us on this list are software engineers, many perhaps for more reasons than
> to put food on the table. My question to you is: how can we make it easier,
> or more fun, or more motivating to contribute to Qt, and to help with
> making things better?
>
>
> Volker
>
>
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