qqc2-breeze-stlye in KDE Review

[Jonathan Riddell]

No complaints so I've moved it to Plasma.  It has been included in the
Plasma 5.21 beta.

Jonathan


On Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 09:29, Noah Davis <noahadvs at gmail.com> wrote:

> https://invent.kde.org/plasma/qqc2-breeze-style/
>
> qqc2-breeze-style is a Qt Quick Controls 2 style made with Qt Quick
> and Kirigami. It has a visual style that is meant to match the Visual
> Design Group's vision for Breeze.
>
> My motivations for making this include the following reasons.
>
> - Creating, iterating on and maintaining a Qt Quick/Kirigami based
> QQC2 style is relatively easy.
>
> - Plasma Mobile needs an efficient QQC2 style.
>     - qqc2-breeze-style has better graphical performance than Plasma
> style/PC3 and qqc2-desktop-style. It doesn't depend on the speed of
> the Qt SVG renderer when rendering elements for the 1st time and most
> graphical elements are drawn with the GPU.
>     - It has much better RAM usage than PC3, slightly better RAM usage
> than qqc2-desktop-style and about the same RAM usage as Material.
> After opening all pages of Kirigami Gallery, PC3 used 254MB,
> qqc2-desktop-style used 185MB, qqc2-breeze-style used 182MB and
> Material used 180MB. Take those numbers with a grain of salt since the
> absolute amount of RAM used can vary based on how much free RAM there
> is.
>     - Its loading times are much better than PC3. I don't remember the
> exact number, but I'm pretty sure it took half as long to load Index
> (Maui file manager) on a PinePhone compared to PC3.
>
> - We occasionally have QQC2 style compatibility issues with 3rd party
> apps that don't force a specific QQC2 style and have been designed
> using other QQC2 styles. qqc2-breeze-style is much more compatible
> with the Default (Basic in Qt 6), Fusion and Material QQC2 styles than
> Plasma style/PC3 and qqc2-desktop-style, so 3rd party apps should be
> less likely to have issues with it. The Fusion QQC2 style will become
> the default QQC2 style on Linux in Qt 6, so I'd expect to see more
> apps designed for it in the future. Unless GNOME starts shipping an
> Adwaita QQC2 style, Fusion will probably be the QQC2 style that 3rd
> party desktop environment users see by default.
>
> - I'd like 3rd party app developers to be able to adopt the look of
> KDE apps even if they aren't part of KDE. As far as I know, there
> aren't that many open source QQC2 styles out there. The visuals of the
> Qt QQC2 styles are not terrible, but not very impressive either and
> the Material QQC2 style is not up to date with Material Design.
> qqc2-breeze-style could gain some popularity outside of KDE if it's
> easy for developers to use and proven on low power platforms like
> Plasma Mobile on the PinePhone.
>
> - Plasma style/PC3 is unfortunately limited by needing to be
> compatible with PC2 in order to not break existing Plasma themes. This
> makes it a fairly poor choice for anything but Plasmoids and anything
> else that doesn't need to be cross-platform or compatible with
> multiple QQC2 styles. Using SVGs for UI graphics has its advantages
> when you want to make something that isn't easy to make with just
> Rectangle/ShadowedRectangle. However, it seriously gets in the way for
> anything that can easily be made with just rectangles, which is most
> UI graphics in the style of Breeze. Plus, manually editing SVGs in a
> text editor to get the element IDs and CSS classes right is never fun.
>
> - qqc2-desktop-style is unfortunately limited by the fact that it gets
> most of its visuals from the system QStyle. This means there's no way
> for it to do things that would be basic in Qt Quick, such as
> animations and drawing shadows/glows/focus rings outside the bounds of
> buttons. Changing the visuals at all is harder in general due to the
> facts that the Breeze QStyle is massive and it's very easy to create
> serious issues in many apps that are hard to fix. See the struggles
> that went into making the new header area of the Breeze QStyle. In
> QML, this would have been easy.
>
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