Products · Product
Qt
Raised as a usability problem by 108 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 106 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
GUI building requires non-intuitive hand-coding that feels slowUnreviewed
20112026- Quick-based desktop UIs feel unlike expected desktop UI behavior and are hard to use2020-10-27
- GUI building requires non-intuitive hand-coding and feels slow and hard2018-12-13
- Building a large GUI in code becomes messy, unorganized and cumbersome to manage2018-05-02
Scrolling, Tab, text selection and right-click don't work properlyUnreviewed
20112026- Scrolling, Tab keys, text selection and right-click don't work, and no accessibility options exist2019-10-24
- Selecting text in an input box switches tabs instead, making selection impossible2017-05-24
- Text boxes don't support standard navigation keystrokes, making them hard to use2017-04-11
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Hours spent figuring out how to get a list with images working2026-05-12
- Distributing the app and making an installer is a pain to set up2026-05-07
- Qt and GTK toolkits are hard to use for building desktop app interfaces2026-02-02
- Custom styling goes wrong and the tool adds unnecessary cruft to UI files2025-10-27
- Layout in the preview sometimes differs from what appears at runtime2025-10-27
- LGPL option is buried and the installer pushes users toward commercial license and account2025-05-09
- Autocomplete and navigation features are annoying and distracting while coding2024-12-24
- Touch UI on embedded device is choppy, jagged and sluggish to respond2024-12-02
- Touch handlers can't stop event propagation, making custom popups unusable2024-09-16
- Bridging QML and C++ requires finicky macros and Qt-specific constructs, which is painful2024-09-06
- Can't drag widgets in hierarchy view, so empty zero-size containers are hard to fill2024-05-31
- Qt apps need manual environment variables and fractional scaling is unreliable on mixed-DPI monitors2024-05-22
- Ok and Cancel buttons are swapped on Linux, so users click the wrong one2024-03-28
- Tightly coupled C++ subclassing and method overriding makes building UIs hard2024-01-20
- Full page rendering on mobile is noticeably slower and laggier than native2023-12-26
- Text in comboboxes is not vertically centered correctly on macOS2023-12-19
- Moving controls to a new empty parent is hard to do, and the designer is buggy2023-12-04
- UIC and QML files confusing, overly engineered, harder than writing C++ directly2023-11-23
- Dock widgets work poorly in native Wayland, unusable in Qt 52023-09-01
- Scrolling lacks inertia and text components don't work well with autocorrect on mobile2023-08-17
- QDockWidget literally fails on Wayland, so widgets can't be redocked in most cases2023-06-09
- Qt apps need dependency fights and arcane environment variables to get working2023-04-21
- Each element manages child nodes differently, making it horrible to program with2023-04-15
- Hard to set up and use, with painful tooling like QtCreator and MOC2023-02-08
- Too many editors, design languages and packages; installation so hard the user couldn't get Qt6 running2022-12-17
- Constant red error messages while typing make the user anxious2022-08-18
- Qt apps don't pick up the GNOME theme, so window decorations look wrong2022-07-30
- Visual editor and .ui files add an extra layer that complicates development for programmers2022-07-24
- Debugging interface often gets stuck and fails to understand GDB2022-07-17
- Qt modal dialog behaviour on X is annoying and hard to work with2022-07-01
- Developer finds QAbstractItemModel hard to work with, so recomputes whole lists2022-06-18
- Installer is a minefield because Qt pushes users toward its commercial offering2022-06-18
- Designer is barely usable, forcing tedious manual work that other tools automate2022-05-19
- Slot setup for updating widgets from worker threads is confusing and hard to implement2022-04-12
- Application feels like a poorly designed Electron app with terrible user experience2022-04-12
- Retained-mode GUI frameworks like Qt are bloated and complicated to develop with2022-03-26
- UI development with Qt is very slow moving and hard to iterate2022-03-26
- Can't find a way to launch the Qt visual interface editor anymore2022-03-12
- Qt Designer is hidden in the installer and IDE, so it can't be found2021-12-12
- Parent-owns-child rules and naked pointer ownership are a trap for newcomers2021-11-05
- Modern Qt apps are totally unusable when run over network X11 forwarding2021-10-28
- Non-integer scale factors make Windows-style widgets shift and misalign with rounding errors2021-10-09
- Apps built with Qt may not support screen readers, so blind users cannot use them2021-10-08
- Dynamic widget hiding and removal are a real pain due to ownership and layout2021-08-20
- Developers must run a preprocessor and generated boilerplate code, making it hard to develop and maintain2021-04-09
- Page froze and stopped responding to clicks; fields unfocusable, no keyboard controls2021-03-03
- Demos lack accessibility, keyboard control, focusable fields, and scrolling works poorly2021-03-03
- Framework forces developers to use its own build system and project structure2021-01-06
- Creating transient widgets like dialogs is really hard to do2020-12-09
- Adding hover and click interactivity to drawn charts is arduous and undocumented2020-11-02