Fedora's Qt-Based Media Writer Seeing Improvements

Fedora Media Writer is the project's cross-platform utility for deploying Fedora install images to USB drives in an easy-to-user manner and for selecting from the various Fedora spins. One of Red Hat's engineers has recently been working on some modernization improvements to this Fedora image writer.

While Fedora Workstation continues to be GNOME/GTK-focused, with macOS and Windows being supported alongside Linux for the Fedora Media Writer, it's understandably written using a Qt5 interface for greater cross-platform compatibility. Jan Grulich of Red Hat has been working to modernize this C++ program since it has been relying on the deprecated Qt Quick Controls 1.

Grulich has been working to move off the Qt Quick Controls 1 code to using Qt Quick Controls 2. In the process, a new QQC2-based Adwaita-Qt theme was developed for better matching the Fedora Workstation desktop.

The Qt Quick Controls 2 port for the Fedora Media Writer is considered finished albeit not 100% complete yet. It's at least in good enough shape that new test builds for Windows / macOS / Linux were released.

More details for those interested in a cross-platform, GUI-driven way for deploying Fedora ISOs to USB can see this blog post on the latest work.