[Interest] Qt Quick 1 deprecated but no native styles for Qt Quick 2?

[Jean-Michaël Celerier]

I've used this for desktop style (before they tied it to other KDE libs -
looking at you, ExtraCmakeModules) :
https://github.com/KDE/qqc2-desktop-style

It works fine for me (though you have to mingle a bit with the font
settings to get the exact same text rendering than on QWidget in my
experience)

On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 10:06 AM Dimitar Dobrev via Interest <

This e-mail is a better version of the comments I've left
<https://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/12/06/qt-5-12-lts-released/>.
The release notes for Qt 5.12 <https://wiki.qt.io/New_Features_in_Qt_5.12>
worry me quite a little. They say that Qt Quick 1 is deprecated. There's a
single but key reason this is extremely bad news. And this reason is the
lack of native styles in Qt Quick 2. This alone renders Qt Quick 2 useless
for building decent desktop applications. This in turn means our only
option remains Qt Widgets - a piece of technology which is like a horse
carriage. Good for its time but useless in the era of automobiles. The very
notion of suggesting that for desktop development in 2018 we would be
deprived of a simple declarative language for GUI, a flexible scripting
language to match, GPU-based optimizations and all other wonderful features
Qt Quick has to offer - is ridiculous at best. If it's true that Qt Quick 1
is deprecated and Qt Quick 2 won't get native styles any time soon, this
simply means Qt has severely regressed in its offerings to developers.
In addition, I have tracked Qt Quick from its very beginning in 2010 and I
clearly remember you, the Qt developers, advertised Qt Quick as the new
generation of tools and technologies for building graphical user
interfaces. You said Qt Widgets was not (yet) deprecated but fully finished
and would receive few new features and basic optimizations. I hope you will
spare me effort of quotations in support of that above because I think such
actions would be rather ugly. You know what I'm talking about. I see this
as an additional problem to the one described in my first paragraph. You
have made a promise and repeated that promise for years. If Qt Quick 1 is
no more and so are native styles, there's unfortunately one conclusion -
that you have reneged on this promise.
I am asking of the entire community of developers and management of Qt -
please prove me wrong. Please assure me I'm overreacting. Please tell me Qt
Quick 2 is going to get native styles so that we have the outstanding Qt
Quick 2 for the desktop again.
Best regards,
Dimitar Dobrev
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Interest mailing list
https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest

[Uwe Rathmann]

They say that Qt Quick [Controls] 1 is deprecated.

Actually QC1 didn't have much of a future once QC2 had been started - or
did you never ask yourself, why this happened instead of trying to get
the performance + memory problems of QC1 under control ?

The fact that this was never communicated this way has to be criticized,
and everyone who started a desktop application using QML since then has
all reasons to complain.

This in turn means our only option remains
Qt Widgets - a piece of technology which is like a horse carriage. Good
for its time but useless in the era of automobiles.

Not sure why you consider automobiles being related to desktop
applications, but for standard desktop applications, yes:

Qt/Widgets is the only "future proof" remaining option.

But wasn't QML on the desktop a failure from the beginning - at least my
perception is, that it never gained much interest and most desktop
related projects simply continued using Qt/Widgets.

The very notion of
suggesting that for desktop development in 2018 we would be deprived of
a simple declarative language for GUI, a flexible scripting language to
match, GPU-based optimizations and all other wonderful features Qt Quick
has to offer - is ridiculous at best.

My complaints go the other way round: why am I forced to use JavaScript,
only to make use the modern Graphic stack ?

As we don't accept this limitation, we stopped paying much attention to
what the Qt development is working on and implemented our Qt/Quick
application using: https://github.com/uwerat/qskinny ).

I am asking of the entire community of developers and management of Qt -
please prove me wrong. Please assure me I'm overreacting. Please tell me
Qt Quick 2 is going to get native styles so that we have the outstanding
Qt Quick 2 for the desktop again.

QC2 has explicitly been sold as a solution for embedded user interfaces -
in opposite to desktop. Dropping desktop related features is actually
part of trying to make the Qt/Quick technology less heavy.

But even in case the Qt development decides to re-focus on the desktop:
improving Qt/Widgets would be way more interesting than spending any more
time on the QML for desktop corner case.

Instead, migrating widgets to make use of the scene graph ( = GPU based
optimizations ) is an expectation I would have for Qt6.
And yes, this would significantly break compatibility - but this is no
excuse for continuing with an outdated graphic stack, that has already
been identified as a problem in 2012, forever.

My 2 cents,
Uwe