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Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

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Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#31

Post by Shadonototra »

most mac apps aren't based on QT, they are based on cocoa, mac people don't need to use 3rd party when the official solution destroy the competition

macOS apps are smoother than windows apps because microsoft forces JIT'd applications, which hurts both startup and UX, you can feel JIT doing work when there are animations / click on buttons, and installation is slow because it copies a shit ton of DLLs and a massive runtime

even more noticeable on 120hz+ monitors

linux is the worst, people are addicted to python, and god knows how slow it is

Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#32

Post by pavlov »

Closi wrote: post #23
tssge wrote: post #20

I find Qt is on par with native apps. Didn't even know it wasn't considered native. Electron apps on the other hand are very obvious from their resource usage, general laggyness and slow startup time. Say compare Discord (Electron) to Telegram (Qt) and it's like night and day.

Eh, I don't think it's always obvious - for instance Visual Studio Code I would never have guessed was an Electron app.

There are a few places where it's obvious VS Code isn't a native Mac app. For example drag & drop between apps doesn't work as it should.

(When initiating a drag, VS Code steals active app focus and brings its windows to front. It should stay in the background so that you can drag content into another app. This is a behaviour that views in Cocoa applications just inherit automatically.)

Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#33

Post by formerly_proven »

pavlov wrote: post #32
Closi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I don't think it's always obvious - for instance Visual Studio Code I would never have guessed was an Electron app.

There are a few places where it's obvious VS Code isn't a native Mac app. For example drag & drop between apps doesn't work as it should. (When initiating a drag, VS Code steals active app focus and brings its windows to front. It should stay in the background so that you can drag content into another app. This is a behaviour that views in Cocoa applications just inherit automatically.)

> (When initiating a drag, VS Code steals active app focus and brings its windows to front. It should stay in the background so that you can drag content into another app. This is a behaviour that views in Cocoa applications just inherit automatically.)

This is a good design. It's very dumb that on other OSes initiating dragging steals focus and often hides where you want to drop.

Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#34

Post by avrionov »

CarVac wrote: post #30
pjmlp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qt 6 is quite smooth.

I'm patiently waiting for it to become available in open-source repositories. I may need to set up some other way to use it for my builds…

QT 6.1.3 is available via vcpkg already.

Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#35

Post by fleg »

donboscow wrote: post #8
rvz wrote: post #7

Just look at Telegram as a real example and compare that against the other messenger apps since the majority of them use Electron and Telegram uses Qt for some of its desktop clients.

You mean to say Telegram is smoother than other apps? Will try it out. In general, would you say that Qt is supposed to work just as buttery smooth and native on Mac or iPhone as a native app? And will an OS built on Qt like Ubuntu Touch will be as smooth and beautifully craftable as iOS apps on iPhone?

Hard to say if it'll be as smooth as iPhone, but my experience with PinePhone shows that Qt-based environments (Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS, even KDE) are way smoother than Phosh, which is based on Gtk. PinePhone isn't the most powerful phone out there, but I'd risk saying that SailfishOS is pretty smooth on it.

Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#36

Post by mathverse »

rvz wrote: post #7

Just look at Telegram as a real example and compare that against the other messenger apps since the majority of them use Electron and Telegram uses Qt for some of its desktop clients.

Telegram feels smoothish but not smooth.And it also feels out of place on Windows.

It's also not that performant compared to something like KakaoTalk (not sure what they use..perhaps they are truly native and only use OS libs)

Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#37

Post by raphaelj »

Shadonototra wrote: post #31

most mac apps aren't based on QT, they are based on cocoa, mac people don't need to use 3rd party when the official solution destroy the competition macOS apps are smoother than windows apps because microsoft forces JIT'd applications, which hurts both startup and UX, you can feel JIT doing work when there are animations / click on buttons, and installation is slow because it copies a shit ton of DLLs and a massive r…

Most Linux and Windows apps do any significant computation except when relying on (usually) native/C/C++ libraries that do it (GUI, science stuff, IO ...). So it does not really matter if it is coded in Python, C# or C++, as most of the CPU time is spent on native code anyway.

Code quality is a way more important factor in app perceived slowness.

Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#38

Post by sigzero »

McDyver wrote: post #21
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with KDE plasma? The beauty (and curse) of Plasma, is that it's so configurable, you can make it look and feel like anything else.

If you are privacy-minded, KDE (with the kuserfeedback) should put you off, due to the user data it collects and sends back. You can disable the sending back, but not the collection. There are a number of packets that depend on this, so you can't just remove it. Although you can recompile it to disable data collection, it's not something everyone just does.

It's been in there for a least 2 years. A quick Google search leads me to no big rants about it. shrug

Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#39

Post by raphaelj »

jcelerier wrote: post #25
webmobdev wrote: post #11

My personal experience in using QT apps is that they load / render perceptibly slower than the native UIs and QT applications are slightly bulkier in size (storage space and memory). This is kind of understandable as QT emulates the UI through its own library (unlike, say, Lazarus IDE / Delphi GUI library that directly use the native UI library). However, size doesn't matter much today, and the very minor rendering d…

> This is kind of understandable as QT emulates the UI through its own library (unlike, say, Lazarus IDE / Delphi GUI library that directly use the native UI library). In the end it does not matter that you push pixels from qt5gui.dll or shell32.dll, no ?

Except that Qt might not be loaded/initialized by the time you launch your app.

Re: Ask HN: Smoothness and performance of Qt based systems vs. native apps and OS

#40

Post by nick__m »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #29
McDyver wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are privacy-minded, KDE (with the kuserfeedback) should put you off, due to the user data it collects and sends back. You can disable the sending back, but not the collection. There are a number of packets that depend on this, so you can't just remove it. Although you can recompile it to disable data collection, it's not something everyone just does.

This is the first time I'm hearing about this. Do you have a source?

i had the api reference open as i was trying to automate something in kwin... https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kuserfeedback/html/index.html https://community.kde.org/Policies/Telemetry_Policy
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