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The lengths we will go to avoid writing a proper desktop application.
by Exoristos 11mo ago
The lengths we will go to avoid writing a proper desktop application.
- conceptme 11mo agobecause there is no proper UI library that does cross platform as well as the web
- raffraffraff 11mo agoNot just UI. I just wrote a KDE Plasma 6 widget for systemd-networkd / networkd and it was a nightmare.
- kosolam 11mo agoWhy? Give more details please
- robert_dipaolo 11mo agoWhat about QT? I've used that in the past and it's really good for native apps.
- Kelteseth 11mo agoWe are using it for our apps, but I can see why people do not use it for new projects: 1. The state of C++ is not great. Few developers, C++ footguns, complicated build systems, and generally slow progress, see my https://arewemodulesyet.org/ https://arewemodulesyet.org/ 2. How Qt presents and licenses itself. Either you go LGPL or you have to pay big money for a commercial license, which will then infect all other apps as well. For example, when you have two Qt apps that talk to each other you must license _both_ commercially. 3. The split of Widgets and QML makes the ecosystem fragmented, because Widgets will never die. Even the Qt devs themselves are split about this. You can see this when example code for a new feature uses Widgets. QtCreator is also a nice example, where they reverted some new QML code quite a while ago and have not substantially added any new QML code since then. 4. Tooling: We use QML for everything and the tooling is not great. The language server is still super flaky and breaks, and developer tooling like the Chrome Dev Tools is virtually nonexistent. 5. Packaging is still also not great but has gotten better in the last few versions where Qt creates a deployment cmake script for you, but you still need logic for your own (vcpkg) packages.
- rubymamis 11mo agoIndeed, I wrote my note-taking app using Qt with QML: https://get-notes.com https://get-notes.com
- adastra22 11mo agoThere are quite a few. Qt, React Native, Xamarin, and Flutter come to mind.
- mono442 11mo agoI wouldn't exactly call Flutter native. It uses its own rendering engine and doesn't necessarily behave like operating system native controls. It is not really different from using electron.
- lloydatkinson 11mo agoWhat are the Linux native controls? GTK and KDE controls are native to GTK and KDE.
- jdiff 11mo agoSure, but GTK and KDE aren't also cross-platform native.
- adastra22 11mo ago"Native" seems to mean different things to different people. I'm mostly with you on this, but the tides are turning. In any case, the other 3 do use real native widgets.
- prmoustache 11mo ago
- lloydatkinson 11mo agoMy cross platform application written in C#/.NET and Avalonia strongly disagrees with this crazy assertion. I can also think of QT and GTK for other languages too.
- anthk 11mo agoLazarus and Free Pascal and it will run several times faster than the web.
- breve 11mo agoThese two are good: https://avaloniaui.net/ https://avaloniaui.net/ https://platform.uno/ https://platform.uno/
- divan 11mo agoWhat's the reason not to write desktop apps in Flutter in 2025?
- mock-possum 11mo agoBut I already know how to write a web app, I don’t know how to write a desktop app. It’s faster to just write and wrap a web app, and as far as most people can tell, it works just fine. Ya gotta be practical.
- adastra22 11mo agoIt's a strange world that I live in now.
- gen2brain 11mo agoTo me, this argument always sounds like someone is being forced or threatened into creating a desktop app. It was never supposed to be easy; the goal is to create an app that users would want and will actually use.
- pjmlp 11mo agoI have been programming since 1986, have enough knowledge across several platforms, even though in 2025 distributed systems + Web UI pays the bills, I can still easily code native in a couple of UI frameworks. Doing native UIs is only a matter of actually wanting to learn how to do it.
- Exoristos 11mo agoWhy can't there be web developers and desktop developers?
- foresto 11mo agoYou might find this appealing: https://github.com/mappu/miqt https://github.com/mappu/miqt
- irq-1 11mo agoCame here to say this. I just started with miqt and it seems to work really well. Go + Qt is near ideal.
- diath 11mo agoMaking good GUI software requires a lot of iteration and trial and error before you're satisfied with the UI and UX. With a web-based tech, you make a change, auto reload triggers, you see the change almost instantly, making tweaking very easy. If you're working with a large Qt codebase, every little change to a header file requires a long ass compile times. It's really frustrating when you spend an hour just tweaking a few controls when you know it could have taken 5 minutes. Also, the reactive model as seen in web frameworks like React or Vue is much superior to the typical flow of state management in retained mode GUI applications in desktop frameworks. Until we have a decent solution that solves these problems, people will continue using tech like Electron or OS web views.
- throwup238 11mo agoIt takes half a day to implement proper hot reload in QtQuick, which also has all the reactive features. Even less now that AI can just write it for you, and it’ll be more performant than Vite dev builds. Coming to desktop app development from the web, I’ve got most of the same conveniences I’m used to like GammaRay as the inspector. The only real difference is I’m willing to wade through cmake and linking errors. Even QWidgets is still super fast to develop with if you’re using PySide (although hot reload is a bit more difficult to implement and distribution becomes the nightmare).
- diath 11mo agoQML is not native, PySide uses Python. If you pick either of those, you lose native controls and low level language for performance, so again, may as well use web-based tech. Especially that HTML/CSS support significantly more styling/animating options than QML.
- rubymamis 11mo agoQt Quick components are just C++ classes[1]. [1] https://github.com/qt/qtdeclarative https://github.com/qt/qtdeclarative
- foresto 11mo ago
- PaulKeeble 11mo agoFyne is a pretty decent native solution for doing this in Go.
- jdiff 11mo agoIt's fast, quick, and easy, but it's peak programmer UI. It's pretty unattractive, does not integrate well with its host OS (in terms of behavior), and does not integrate at all with accessibility tools. At least last I looked into it.
- pjmlp 11mo agoWhen all that people want to use is how to use an hammer, they see nails everywhere.