SDDM QML-Based Display Manager No Longer Simple

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SDDM QML-Based Display Manager No Longer Simple

Last month I wrote about SDDM, the Simple Display Desktop Manager, that's a lightweight QML-based display manager. SDDM is still very lightweight, but its feature-list continues to grow as it becomes a more viable alternative to the likes of GDM, LightDM, and KDM...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTMwNDA

[scionicspectre]

It's great to see Qt's power and flexibility shown off more and more, these days. We need GTK to get up to the same standard of portability and dynamics so we can bring everyone along to modern devices and interfaces, while keeping the desktop strong, especially with Wayland. I get the feeling that, with the right focus, Maui could show people the true value of Qt more tangibly than KDE typically does. Qt has lived with this irrational stigma for being slow and inefficient for so long- it's nice to see projects like this disprove many of those assumptions.

[aavci]

It's great to see Qt's power and flexibility shown off more and more, these days. We need GTK to get up to the same standard of portability and dynamics so we can bring everyone along to modern devices and interfaces, while keeping the desktop strong, especially with Wayland. I get the feeling that, with the right focus, Maui could show people the true value of Qt more tangibly than KDE typically does. Qt has lived with this irrational stigma for being slow and inefficient for so long- it's nice to see projects like this disprove many of those assumptions.

just to clarify sddm is not part of the maui project, it is a seperate project. the theme is based on a mockup from the maui community, hence the name.

sidenote, shown in the video is the performance on free r600g driver while screencasting. so qt/qml has a pretty decent performance.

[scionicspectre]

Right- I should have been more clear that I was talking about Qt's new uses generally and not conflating SDDM with the Maui project's DM (if they have one, yet). Thanks for pointing that out. The note about Qt/QML on r600g makes me wonder how performant Qt applications could be on less performant drivers, especially apps that use OpenGL. A graphics editor or video composition app, for instance.

[GreatEmerald]

Looks like it's shaping up nicely, indeed. It could be very interesting for use with Razor-qt.

[aavci]

Right- I should have been more clear that I was talking about Qt's new uses generally and not conflating SDDM with the Maui project's DM (if they have one, yet). Thanks for pointing that out. The note about Qt/QML on r600g makes me wonder how performant Qt applications could be on less performant drivers, especially apps that use OpenGL. A graphics editor or video composition app, for instance.

Well, for my card r600g is _the_ less performant driver. The proprietary driver should be more performant.

Regarding apps using OpenGL, performance probably wouldn't be limited by the graphics toolkit, e.g Qt. For such applications you would either use OpenGL or another 3D engine, for example OGRE and the performance depends on the graphics part. I have done 3D apps using Qt and OGRE. GUI's are not the performance bottleneck generally in this kind of apps.

But, in general a QtQuick2 based GUI should give better performance than a QWidgets based or QtQuick1 based GUI, since it uses a proper scenegraph and hardware acceleration.