Slint 1.1 Released For This Rust-Tailored GUI Toolkit, New Royalty-Free License

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Slint 1.1 Released For This Rust-Tailored GUI Toolkit, New Royalty-Free License

Back in April was the release of Slint 1.0 for this open-source, Rust-focused graphical toolkit formerly known as SixtyFPS. Today marks the release of Slint 1.1 as the first significant feature update after crossing the 1.0 milestone...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Slint-1.1

[stompcrash]

Flat, minimalistic GUIs make me throw up a little in my mouth. Every time.

[uid313]

Slint seems rather unattractive. Other widget toolkits such as GTK, Qt, Avalonia and Flutter have much more friendly licenses.

The only attractive thing about Slint is that it is a Rust native toolkit which is likely to provide a nice developer experience, because using GTK from Rust can be a bit awkward.

Slint would be more attractive with a more liberal license, and with more language bindings, such as D, Python, and C# and Kotlin.

[ssokolow]

Slint's biggest problem is that it's even less native-feeling and less featureful than Qt Quick.

I prefer to just use some Python glue (and MyPy type-checking turned up to the max) to stick a QWidget GUI on my Rust codebases.

[cb88]

Yeah there is no way I would use slint with its current GPLv3 license or its license that requries you to host your application on a webpage + allow them to advertise with photos of your application, its also blocks embedded use which seems insane to me.

Make the whole thing MIT or better yet 0BSD so we can all just use it and call it a day. MIT license can result in copyright update nonsense... and text duplication if it every becomes an issue legally to actually use the license in court.

[polarathene]

Yeah there is no way I would use slint with its current GPLv3 license or its license that requries you to host your application on a webpage + allow them to advertise with photos of your application, its also blocks embedded use which seems insane to me.

The webpage requirement was a bit of an odd one to enforce. I get it when it's actually leveraging/deploying web services (like Netlify requires for their open-source free tier license), but doesn't make much sense for desktop apps which already have the "About" menu enforcement. I assume a Github repo README counts as satisfying the website requirement.

Blocking on embedded use, I kind of understand. If you're doing it for a hobby you're not going to care about respecting any license, while commercially when hardware is involved like that you're probably monetizing it so you could cover a license fee. But then that seems what the proprietary license is for, discouraging open-source projects that target embedded devices seems an odd decision.. but I guess the GPLv3 license is meant to support that?

Slint seems nice, but it'll be interesting to see how the licensing affects their adoption/growth.

[polarathene]

Slint's biggest problem is that it's even less native-feeling and less featureful than Qt Quick.

It says that it uses Qt by default if installed on the system, and that is for the native OS look. Is it not leveraging Qt Widgets for that?

[rmfx]

Flat, minimalistic GUIs make me throw up a little in my mouth. Every time.

Then you are not right from a lot of people's point of view.

UIs with over complicated useless details are tiring me and I prefer by far something simpler, cleaner like material design standard and super optimized with minimal effects rather than your tastes.

Also, judging a UI toolkit with a few tech example screeshots is silly, I am sure that with a bit of color, polish and some nice svg icons, you would have not even commented.

[Quackdoc]

Slint is a super promising UI kit, it has to be one of the ones im most looking forwards to using in the future. the new licence is neat, but I dont think I have fully grasped it yet. but slint is an extremely flexible UI it can match really well with QT and feels quite at home, or you can do a more "android esq" material UI so the flexibility is there, or at least, it will be in the future, the widgets it has now are quite limiting (albiet you can still do a lot with them assuming effort is put in), and platform support isn't quite there, in particular no official android support (But some people have gotten it working, im waiting for official support).

all in all im still pretty excited for the future, I think the new royalty free licence needs to be reworded since it is vague at best. in particular the limitation section

2. Limitations
The license does not permit to distribute or make the Software publicly available alone and without integration into an Application. For this purpose you may use the Software under the GNU General Public License, version 3.

The license does not permit the use of the Software within Embedded Systems. An Embedded System is a computer system designed to perform a specific task within a larger mechanical or electrical system. For the purposes of this license, mobile phones are not considered to be Embedded Systems.

it's hard to grasp what this actually means. both sections. for the first subsection, "available alone and without integration into an Application." this makes very little sense. at what point is slint considered to be "part of an application" and what point is it considered to be "the application". for instance if you use marine greetdm a slint based greetd. is slint "the application" or "part of the application". the primary GUI of the application is slint however it still runs functions to interface with the OS in rust. would this be permissible or not?

the second part is confusing too. "designed to perform a specific task within a larger mechanical or electrical system" mobile phones would not be considered embedded under this definition anyways since they are a singular electrical system with a broad variety of tasks. but considering that phones are explictly mentioned to not be considered part of an embedded system. would hand held consoles running linux and a custom UI based on slint be considered embedded systems?

ill be asking for clarification for sure.

[ssokolow]

It says that it uses Qt by default if installed on the system, and that is for the native OS look. Is it not leveraging Qt Widgets for that?

Native look and feel is about more than just widget theming. It's a wholistic thing involving effort by the developer to follow various conventions. That's why things like the KDE, GNOME, and Apple Human Interface Guidelines exist.

Slint impedes my ability to follow those conventions with its paltry selection of widgets and APIs. (Given its young age and the optionality of the Qt backend, it's sort of AWT-like, in that it forces you to a lowest common denominator subset of widgets.)

Unless I want to write a GUI for a bare-metal microcontroller, either PyO3+PyQt/PySide (desktop), egui (web, SPA), or Bootstrap (web, traditional architecture) would be a better choice for a Rust GUI.

(Using PyO3 plus PyQt or PySide to use Python as "QML for QWidget" grants you a much richer and more mature set of widgets and APIs than even Qt Quick, itself much richer than Slint, while egui gives you a richer widget set with a pure Rust API as long as you're fine with any non-web builds of your application not looking or feeling platform-native.)