For those who don’t know, Fedora Media Writer is a tool to create bootable live USB drive with your favorite flavor of Fedora. It is written in C++ with UI written in QML and it is supported on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. It was developed by Martin Bříza, my former collegue from Red Hat, who did an amazing job in the past. Fedora Media Writer (FMW) primarily targets Fedora Workstation and therefore the UI looks like a GNOME app using Adwaita theme. Unfortunately the Adwaita theme changed over time and originally FMW was written using QtQuickControls 1 (deprecated these days) so it needed an UI overhaul.

I started working on FMW during the summer, slowly migrating it to QtQuickControls 2. The original UI had lots of custom QML widgets, basically standard widgets with Adwaita skin on it. I still wanted FMW to use Adwaita theme, because Qt doesn’t have any native QML components for Windows, Mac OSX or GNOME and writing those would require lots of work. Therefore I decided to write a new QQC2 based Adwaita theme which can be used on all platforms. To avoid duplicating half of the code we already have in Adwaita-qt (a QStyle to make QWidgets look like Adwaita), like information about widget sizes and colors, I reworked Adwaita-qt to provide a library so it can be used by projects like this and so they don’t need to update everytime Adwaita changes. It was more work than I anticipated because it needed quite a lot of changes to separate things into library and also to make it build and work on all platforms where I want to use FMW. Good news is that the work is now done and I made a pre-release of Adwaita-qt. The library for now provides information about widget sizes, color palette and colors used by all widgets, but I plan to extend this in future with addition of Adwaita-qt rendering part allowing the library to render basic widgets for you. That’s something I would like to use for example in QGnomePlatform (GNOME platform theme) to render buttons in window decorations. With a lot of information being already said about Adwaita-qt, the work on QQC2 Adwaita theme was an interesting experience and probably the most enjoyable one, because everytime you write a new component and port the app to use it, you see the result of your work and the app slowly migrating towards a more modern UI makes you happy with the result. I don’t know what more to say about the QQC2 Adwaita theme as it’s basically QML variant of widgets we have in Adwaita-qt, with difference that it should look exactly the same on all platforms thanks to using Adwaita-qt. In past with QQC1 all the colors were derived from system QPalette making it slightly different on all platforms. If you wonder why the QQC2 theme is not part of Adwaita-qt, where it will most likely end up, then it’s because it’s not complete yet and contains only components used in FMW itself. Anyway, I have finished the port to QQC2 this week with some late fixes and after I spent a week updating all build systems (Windows, Github CI, Mac OSX) to properly build and produce builds for you to test since I made a new pre-release yesterday \o/.

The work on this port is most likely not 100% finished as I expect some minor issues to appear here and there, but I tried to make this 1:1 copy of the previous version so don’t expect any major changes. I will be glad if you try it and let me know what you think. Thank you and especially big thanks goes to Martin Bříza for his help during the development and for the work he did on this project in the past.

You can get it from following locations:

• Windows build
• Mac OSX build
• Flathub beta

Here you have some images for comparison: