QtDD - Kirigami: convergence with Desktop as first-class

Kirigami is a framework built on top of QML and QtControls2. It aims to make it easier for applications to implement a modern design language for both desktop and mobile systems, providing features that base QML and QtQuickControls don’t have.

Within the KDE project, our main goal (front and center) is and has always been to provide a top-notch desktop experience, even though recently we are interested in mobile as well. QWidgets is a very complete desktop UI framework, but unfortunately, it’s quite behind the times -- mostly based on software rendering and also with an outdated look and feel of its components. On the other hand, QML is a fully-featured modern graphics engine for 2D GUI, perfect for mobile and embedded user interfaces, but still somewhat lacks in components and features that traditional desktop productivity applications need.

Kirigami aims to make life easier for the developer to build good-looking QML-based desktop (and not only) applications. This talk will go over the architecture of Kirigami, the challenges in QML that we worked around, and challenges that are still unsolved problems.

Marco Martin
Marco Martin started contributing to KDE in 2008 and has been an active contributor ever since. Currently, he is the maintainer of the Kirigami framework and co-maintainer of the KDE Plasma Desktop.
He currently works for Blue Systems serving as CTO.

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[vladimirkraus]

Good talk. Unfortunately it totally confirmed my impression that QtQuick/QML is still not ready for desktop. The question is whether it will ever be ready. I would prefer some next-gen widgets. I do not care about animations and hardware acceleration too much. And I do not care about JavaScripting, I do not want it. But I want clean look in both light and dark themes, allowing to change custom styles (but forget about stylesheets, they are horrible) or font size at runtime without any resizing issues (currently QtWidgets have many issue with this - especially in QLayout layer). I also want semi-declarative style of layouts in C++ code... This is what is needed on desktop, IMO. Unfortunately there is very little interest in fixing bugs in QtWidgets in Qt Company, and developing of next-gen widgets is hardly imaginable.

[RonaldoSousa-doou]

❤😂🎉😢😮😅😊Ronaldo vasscoselo sousa Teixeira

[RokeJulianLockhart.souq]

Currently, I hate Kirigami: its appearance is inconsistent, it constantly utilizes client-side decoration to create fake windows unnecessarily (why reinvent the wheel, especially to bypass the window-manager?!) and it does not adhere to the typographical size mandated by the desktop environment. It is certainly not ready yet, although I really want it to be so that graphical convergence is able to finally be feasible.