I'm back with a GPU.. Qt Creator still not working

[Mlibu]

@JonB I have tried four computers so far. An Asus Vivo flipbook, a Thinkpad T440, This Dell Optiplex and a Lenovo mini PC (Thinkcenter M73). None of them work.

[JonB]

@Mlibu
Oh dear, oh dear! the problem might be you then... ;-)

Try Ubuntu 22.04 and the Qt 5.15 that comes with. Yep, it's not Qt6. I use it, loads of others have, and nobody can't run Creator. If that fails it must be you ;-)

[Mlibu]

@JonB OK that's totally fine. I understand that it may be me. But telling me that doesn't help me understand why this is happening. I have done around 10 fresh OS installs so far because people tell me I'm doing something wrong and then I install the packages they tell me to and it still doesn't work. I have googled on every error I get pretty much and there is just nothing.

As far as I can tell I'm meeting all the requirements for Qt Creator. I even bought a system with a GPU even though I don't need a gaming machine because I thought that was the problem but apparently Qt Creator doesn't need a GPU.

If I'm doing something wrong then it should be easy to explain what it is.

[JonB]

@Mlibu
If t were that simple then someone would indeed have told you by now! We know it works for us, not why it doesn't for you. That's why I picked something like Ubuntu 20.04 + Qt 5.15 just to see whether that went through OK for you. And no, Creator does not need any GPU.

[Mlibu]

@JonB Ok well that was going to be my next plan. And no I'm not going to believe it's me because there is literally nothing I could be doing differently. I have tried every combination.

The only other thing I can try is ask my kids to try installing it on their windows PCs. They are a lot newer. Now my only fear is that I'm going to need a brand new computer to do this in which case I'm going to have Windows anyway and linux is moot. I can't just blindly buy a system hoping it will work.

And if it was simple I would have figured it out myself.

[Tink]

@Mlibu said in I'm back with a GPU.. Qt Creator still not working:

@Tink I was told that QT Design Studio was a commercial product and that it did not have all the same features of Qt Creator and not to use it for QtQuick development. I was told Qt Design Studio is more based on forms than applications. And indeed when I tried it, there were strange things happening. It insisted on creating qml files and ui.qml files but it wouldn't edit the qml files. I tried to find anything about comparing them on the Qt site but didn't find anything.

From the link i gave you:

"Qt Design Studio is also available as a free community version."

And it depends on what your goal is.

"Qt Designer is the Qt tool for designing and building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with Qt Widgets. For user interface design with Qt Quick, see Qt Design Studio."
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtdesigner-manual.html

Note: You have the option of using Qt Quick and Qt Design Studio for user interface design rather than widgets. It is a much easier way to write many kinds of applications. It enables a completely customizable appearance, touch-reactive elements, and smooth animated transitions, taking advantage of hardware acceleration.

If you want to focus on Qt Quick, design studio might be perfect. At any rate it might let you actually do something instead of troubleshooting a problem that might resolve itself in a new version of qt / creator.

[Mlibu]

@Tink Even that statement you pasted is confusing though. Qt Designer is the standalone app that does widgets, I get that. And we have been over Qt Design Studio. But what is the thing that I am trying to get to called? What is in the tab in Qt Creator? I know I have to install a plugin to use it, but is there a name for that part? It almost seems to start another application when I click on the tab. The window disappears and comes back.

Also I was told Qt Design Studio was for forms. You are saying I can make a full application ui with it as well? I have seen youtube courses for Qt Creator but never for Design Studio. What is a ui.qml file?

[JonB]

@Mlibu said in I'm back with a GPU.. Qt Creator still not working:

But what is the thing that I am trying to get to called? What is in the tab in Qt Creator? I know I have to install a plugin to use it, but is there a name for that part? It almost seems to start another application when I click on the tab. The window disappears and comes back.

Now I'm not sure what you are describing. The tab inside Creator where you design widgets is Designer. You don't have to install a plugin for it to work (or installing Creator does whatever for you if Designer is a plugin, I don't know). I don't see any "external application" or "disappearing/reappearing window", though I don't use Creator 12. If we're not sure what we are talking about show a screenshot of whatever "tab" you are clicking?

[Mlibu]

@JonB

So there is Qt Creator with Designer, Qt Designer, and Qt Design Studio. Ugh.

This page:

[JonB]

@Mlibu
Yeah, that's Designer, though it looks a bit different from mine :)

There's really only two things: Creator & Design Studio. Creator just comes with Designer, don't worry about it as separate.

So your screeenshot seems to be fine now, what is your problem? :)

[Mlibu]

@JonB So this is the plugin that you (now) have to install in qt creator 12:

The Designer page won't activate without it.

[Mlibu]

@JonB The rectangle doesn't show its background. It should start as white and I changed it to red. There is no window drawn at all. If I try to move the rectangle by dragging it the blue border just disappears and nothing happens.

[JonB]

@Mlibu
I have now zoomed in to look at your screenshot more closely. Now I see this is a QML designer, because the toolbox items are "Flickable" and stuff from QML/QtQuick. This is not the designer for widgets --- no wonder it looks different for me! On mine the Design tab is like yours but takes me into widget designer, not QML. Have a look at pictures in the Help like https://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-using-qt-designer.html, that shows the Qt widget designer in Creator we have all been talking about,

I have never installed QtQuick or wanted to use it.

I'm going to pass out on this now. Clearly you need someone who knows about Qt Creator 12 or whatever you are installing how.

UPDATE
I see now you are Using Qt Quick Designer. And you have been doing

However, you can enable the Qt Quick Designer plugin in Qt Creator for editing UI files. The functionality is restricted and not all Qt Design Studio features are supported.

You're not supposed to be doing this at all. You have gone down a garden path, that's why it doesn't matter where you try it you have problems. As I suggested earlier, it is to do with what you are installing each time.

Umm.. to get this far you had to start by creating some kind of Project, didn't you? What project type did you select? I'm talking about something like "Qt Widgets Application", did you pick something with "QML" or "QtQuick"?

OK, I finally see from your title bar that you working on a QML project. Why don't we start with: *Are you wanting to create a QML/Quick application or a Widgets application"??

[Tink]

@Mlibu said in I'm back with a GPU.. Qt Creator still not working:

@Tink Even that statement you pasted is confusing though. Qt Designer is the standalone app that does widgets, I get that. And we have been over Qt Design Studio. But what is the thing that I am trying to get to called? What is in the tab in Qt Creator? I know I have to install a plugin to use it, but is there a name for that part? It almost seems to start another application when I click on the tab. The window disappears and comes back.

Also I was told Qt Design Studio was for forms. You are saying I can make a full application ui with it as well? I have seen youtube courses for Qt Creator but never for Design Studio. What is a ui.qml file?

Qt Designer is available as a standalone app and also integrated into creator. E.g. you can use the standalone version to produce a ui file to use in your python project. For a c++ project you just use the integrated designer.

The .ui.qml files should be used with qt design studio. Although there is a qt quick designer plugin in qtcreator as you know.
https://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-qtquickdesigner-plugin.html
https://doc.qt.io/qtcreator/creator-quick-ui-forms.html

All this stuff can be found in the documentation even if you claim that it's not explained anywhere. It is.

[Mlibu]

@JonB I want to create a QML/Quick application. If I wanted widgets I would have been using designer.

When I create the project I select Application (Qt) / Qt Quick application.

Here's the problem with the plugin. If I uninstall it then there is no way to get to the design page at all:

I'm on a QML file but I can't go to the design page.

[Mlibu]

@Tink Yes I read these pages but they don't explain what a UI file is, just that they are used in Qt Quick Designer... Which is confusing because I thought they were used in Qt Design Studio? I know they have something to do with separation of business logic but I haven't seen a diagram or example that demonstrates how they work together.

Also it says that signals are not supported in them and I definitely want signals. It doesn't really say why the UI files are used over regular QML files despite the fact that they don't support as many features.

[Tink]

@Mlibu said in I'm back with a GPU.. Qt Creator still not working:

@Tink Yes I read these pages but they don't explain what a UI file is, just that they are used in Qt Quick Designer... Which is confusing because I thought they were used in Qt Design Studio? I know they have something to do with separation of business logic but I haven't seen a diagram or example that demonstrates how they work together.

Also it says that signals are not supported in them and I definitely want signals. It doesn't really say why the UI files are used over regular QML files despite the fact that they don't support as many features.

If you cant work out these basic questions yourself by searching the documentation...

[Mlibu]

@Tink I have made it very clear that I want to use the Designer page in Qt Creator. Why would I go out of my way to read about UI.QML files if I don't plan to be using them? Up until a short time ago, people told me that Qt Design Studio wasn't as useful as Qt Creator and the links you shows me say they work with "Qt Designer" which I also don't use so why would I have looked any further? I am dubious about UI.QML anyway because in my experience when I separate business logic from UI, there is almost never a 1:1 relationship between those two levels.

I google searched on "an example of how to use ui qml files preferably from QT documentation" and the hits that come up are the ones that you already showed me, along with a stackoverflow with a vague answer and a Reddit.

It's fine, I have already resigned myself to the fact that I will need to keep doing QML manually. I thought I could improve my workflow but I guess I was wrong. I'm doing a lot of graphics in the next project and I dared to dream I could see a visual representation. I'll stop watching YouTube tutorials and aspire to actually do the things shown in them one day.

[Ronel_qtmaster]

i have also installed qt6 on my computer but i have a lot of problem building a simple exemple

[Mlibu]

@Ronel_qtmaster Yes and this is when people told me, "are you stupid? Just install a kit". Now try finding any info on how to do that. There is one section of one page on the Qt document that says "if you don't see kits, go to add kit!". But nowhere does it say that you need to go to the Qt tab, add a Qt instance manually by selecting the 'qmake6' within the Qt directory, then install cmake and ninja and make sure cmake and the right Qt are selected in the main kit tab page. I have done this many times now directly off of fresh OS installs and it doesn't work for me either.