Is there any idiots guide to GUIs?

tuxcnc wrote:

I simply have the mind of an engineer and I hate "artists" who spoil formally good designs to make them bad but nice...
What's the point of a small gray font on a gray background?
LinuxCNC is not a game that you can run in a dark room and then a dark interface actually makes sense.
LinuxCNC is a machine control that can be dangerous and there is no room for anything "nice".
It is no accident that the e-stop button has a different shape and color than the start button, so as not to look for it and not to confuse it with another one when the machine starts to live its own life...
 

All valid points, except the "nice" part, see new Mazak controls, they look like form a space ship. Did not use it yet, so no idea how usable it is.

tuxcnc wrote:

I know that someone will soon start explaining to me that the authors do it for free and I should be grateful to them.
 

OK, it is open source so you can modify it to however you like it, see bellow

tuxcnc wrote:

The rule is simple - if you do something, do it well, and then people will be grateful to you, even if they have to pay for your work...
 

"Do it well" for them might not always be well for you or me, and i am fine with it, as i can modify as i see fit, and be thankful i did not have to do the whole thing from 0.
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Seeing as you are quite good at this, i wonder, would it have taken less time to change the colors instead of this?
I would really like to know, and i do not mean the time it took to make it work for you, i am aware that can be tricky sometimes with versions and stuff, and i had my fair share of numpy issues.
Thank you.

If you have the mind of an engineer, why don't you test the software's functionality instead of complaining you don't like the colour?
Its very comprehensive and the probing is first class.

Always interested in contructive feedback good or bad - really am.
But stuff like this makes me shake my head a bit.

Compiling problems aren't usually QtDragons fault - you didn't  mention what system you are compiling in so no one could help or evaluate the problem.

I'm sorry Qtdragon didn't suit you out of the box, but there is quite alot you could change.
For instance based on your pic, you could turn on the machine and home it, then the colors change from disabled to enabled and look like this:

 

Qtdragon has optional stylesheets to easily change colors, there are several built in.

If fonts are a problem you can change them too.
linuxcnc.org/docs/stable/html/gui/qtdragon.html#_stylesheets

If you asked nice I bet someone would have even helped you get something that works better for your eyes.

Or don't use it at all. Choice is yours. 
 

cmorley wrote:

Compiling problems aren't usually QtDragons fault - you didn't  mention what system you are compiling in so no one could help or evaluate the problem.

I'm sorry Qtdragon didn't suit you out of the box, but there is quite alot you could change.
For instance based on your pic, you could turn on the machine and home it, then the colors change from disabled to enabled and look like this:

 

 

First, about compilation issues.
My system is Debian 13.7 and the LinuxCNC sources are from the Git repository, main branch, i.e. version 2.10.
There is some misunderstanding here, because when LinuxCNC is compiled, the Python scripts are not compiled, but only copied to the right place. This means that if the scripts author screws up, it's his fault, because compilation itself doesn't change anything.
So we have the following flower:
 
This is what happens after compiling LinuxCNC yourself.
However, there are two live images that I ran.
1. linuxcnc_2.9.10-amd64.hybrid.iso
2. linuxcnc_2.10.pre1-amd64.hybrid.iso
Qtdragon starts in both, but neither suits my system.
In linuxcnc_2.9.10-amd64.hybrid.iso there is numpy 2.2.4 but LinuxCNC is 2.9.
In linuxcnc_2.10.pre1-amd64.hybrid.iso there is LinuxCNC 2.10, but Debian 12 with numpy 1.24.2.
Someone's sources have obviously gone wrong...

As for these "gray on grey" numbers, I wrote that I ran Qtdragon for the first time in my life and just took a look. I opened the tab called "offsets", so I thought there were offsets there and it didn't occur to me that it would only work after homing, because offsets have nothing to do with homing the machine.
Well, now I noticed that someone stuffed a machine position into the offsets, for unknown reason, because they can be seen much more conveniently in the window below. I started to wonder what else the authors of Qtdragon would surprise me with, but I think I'm less and less curious about it.
 

As you said qtdragon being python doesn't compile anything.
It preprocess somethings into to bytecode.
Sounds like numbpy is the wrong version.
But now we can investigate, thank you.

So you didn't home the machine while trying to decide if the screen is 'useful' ?
and there was extra information in the list that you didn't like?
Oh and the colors -colors were bad.
And that was worth going on the forum and ranting about how bad the software is?
Sounds like you didn't give it much of a chance.

Shake my head.

I'll try to replicate the numbpy problem.

cmorley wrote:

Sounds like numbpy is the wrong version.

More specifically, it looks like someone did some good work in the 2.9 branch (Qtdragon works with the new numpy 2.2.4), but didn't port it to the 2.10 branch...