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  1. Qt Creator
  2. QTCREATORBUG-29670

Improve first enqounter with QtCreator on Linux

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    • Suggestion
    • Resolution: Unresolved
    • Not Evaluated
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    • Linux/X11

    Description

      Hi there, I am not sure whether this has already been discussed internally or not, but I just wanted to share my experience and to hear some feedback on this suggestion.

       

      My very first encounter with QtCreator was ~8 years ago at university. For me QtCreator at that time was one of the best IDE on linux, especially that it was free. Obviously I have installed that with my Linux package manager (apt).

      Later in my career (~2-3 years ago) I have done the same. However, when I opened QtCreator and was quite dissatisfied, because it was almost the same as 8 years ago, I was quite lazy to research more, thought that weell open-source, linux...  and just installed VSCode and continued using it because it was intuitive and very simple.

       

      And now, I'm part of the Qt Company and I decided to give a Qt Creator another chance, guess how I installed it... Correct. With my package manager, which is apt. (I'm not really sure whether the situation with pacman any better). So I was using it for couple of weeks already, wondering why there are so many other modern IDEs with many modern features and QtC is so behind. And only today, when a colleague of mine posted a screenshot in the chat, I have realized that the version of QtC in apt is waaayy outdated (6.0). So I went hunting for the most up-to-date version and I would say that it was not as pleasant, as it is with some other IDEs, like VSCode. (The fact that I'm a C++ developer on Linux, doesn't mean that I don't like easy plug-and-play nicely looking intuitive interfaces , the perspective which imho is highly underestimated)

       

      First of all, it was not very transparent from the documentation perspective how to get just a QtCreator. Once I've found out a download page with Qt installer (which was already a bit misleading for me, because I wanted ONLY QtCreator) I managed to download it. Then I had to manually change permissions on that downloaded file. After that I was asked for a Qt Account. And this is unfortunately one of the most irritating part IMO. Being forced to set up an account in order to get an IDE, is waaay too demanding IMO for the ideological dinosaurs like me, especially that there are way more well known IDEs out there, free and ready to use, even though I have a rough idea of the incentives behind such approach.

       

      It might seem that all mentioned above is overstatement, however I would still like to stress out, that the amount of "clicks" users need to do to get everything up and running, not including the mental frustration, can highly damage the brand (without researching, I seriously had an impression of QtC as an outdated IDE) and keep people far from using products.

       

      To conclude, that might be some form of my humble proposal:
      1.Simplify and modularize discovery of the products and installation process. I think QtC might be used by many other ppl, not only Qt app developers, hence why I would want setting up an account and manually turning off Qt libs during the install process.

      2. IMHO, many people are quite conservative, it's normal to limit the amount of choices a person has to think about during the day, hence I would say the first encounter should be as streamlined and simple, with the minimal amount of reasoning as possible in order to expand the user base and to invite new users to use Qt products, I think this should not be overlooked.

      3. Legacy is strong and also people have various paradigms imposed by the OS they are using, and in case of Linux I think the mental model "I need to install something -> I go to package manager" is still fundamental. It would be beneficial to have the most recent versions distributed to the package managers

       

      Thank you for reading this I hope to see QtC widely used and the up-do-date versions are quite nice  

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              kileppal Kimmo Leppälä
              dima.a Dmitrii Akshintsev
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