4 ms·
Building a cross-platform UI with support for theming, layouts, accessibility, high-DPI, internationalization, and lots of targets is brutally soul-crushingly h
by api 5y ago
Building a cross-platform UI with support for theming, layouts, accessibility, high-DPI, internationalization, and lots of targets is brutally soul-crushingly hard. It involves a ton of the sort of work that is absolutely not fun and that therefore programmers have to be paid to do.
How would you propose funding such a thing?
Or would you like to volunteer to spend every waking moment of your life fixing bugs like "your layout manager misaligns buttons by 1-2 pixels but only on my system when the moon is full or on 64-bit CPUs in the Northern hemisphere while using Arabic languages."
That's what working with UI/UX is like, especially if you support... well... really anything other than native macOS on systems sold by Apple in the last 4 years only. It's why FOSS has never crossed over into the mainstream in any meaningful way. Making software is fun. Making it polished, pretty, and usable is a house of pain. Doing that across platforms is a journey into the lower circles of hell.
Electron is heavily subsidized by Google (and others) via Chromium. It's also a much more bloated user-unfriendly resource hog than Qt. But we use it because paying for quality software is unthinkable. Now off to Starbucks to buy another $12 coffee drink.
- _jordan 5y agoThat's definitely a good point. But it's also sort of self-fulfilling: those layout misalignments and RTL font issues you mentioned become less of an issue as more people embrace Qt. Chrome presumably has figured it out simply because so many people are reliant on it working. If more people embraced Qt, they'd fix the hard parts as they would have more investment.
- pjmlp 5y agoGtk+ was originally picked up to face Qt back in the Linux pre-historic days. We all know how well those community contributions turned out.