Updates on the ISO Image Writer rewrite

Friday, 11 July 2025  |  Akki ( @Holychicken )

tldr: QML port going full speed, researched KDE's design language, ISO Selection window added and Backend integration started

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on porting parts of the IsoImageWriter UI from traditional QtWidgets to QML. The goal is to modernize the look and feel, while also making the interface more extensible for future features. As expected, switching over to QML wasn’t just a copy-paste job, I had to spend quite a bit of time digging through KDE’s design guidelines to ensure the result actually feels like a KDE app, not just a weekend demo project.

The guidelines are listed here

The UI went from

initial_ui_welcome initial_ui_download

to

final_ui_welcome
final_ui_download

The UI still has some rough-edges but is much closer to KDE's design guidelines.

Some changes are:

  • Not using Gradients
  • Using Kirigami components whenever possible as they create that KDE look-and-feel
  • iterating over the previous UI instead of redesigning a radically different one

One of the main features we’re planning to introduce is the ability to download ISOs directly from the app. This meant building a new page for that functionality. Initially, I had the idea of listing all available ISOs from Quickemu/Quickget, over 100 of them, but @ngraham wisely pointed out that this could overwhelm users. So instead, the current plan is to show a curated list of popular ISOs. I’ll be discussing this more with the team to figure out which distributions make the most sense to include.

I also ran into a few hiccups with the build system. IsoImageWriter already had an existing CMake setup, but I had to tweak things to get it to properly handle QML files. It took a bit of trial and error, but it’s in a better place now.

Next up: wiring up the backend functionality and connecting it to the new QML UI.

follow along this merge requests to see what's going on :)