How to detect "user interface idiom" of a screen?

[Publicnamer]

On some OSes, you can differentiate how a screen is being used based on an "idiom", which is to say one of:

• phone
• tablet
• laptop/desktop

For instance, the iPhone has the idiom UIUserInterfaceIdiomPhone and the iPad has UIUserInterfaceIdiomPad.
I believe Android has equivalent concepts.
In the case of the PinePhone Linux phone, it can use the main phone screen as a phone user interface, and a connected HDMI monitor as a desktop GUI.

How in Qt can I programmatically learn which UI idiom is being used on a given screen?

[SGaist]

Hi,

That's a good question. You should contact the Pine Phone folks to see if they have implemented something particular for that.

Did you check QScreen::name ?

[Publicnamer]

@SGaist Grepping through the Qt5 header files I don't see any mention of the idea
of a phone UI versus a desktop UI.
Does Qt6 have such a differentiation?

I'm waiting for someone who has a pinephone to let me know.
I see that for my monitor the name is HDMI-1, the same as what the xrandr program reports.

[sierdzio]

@Publicnamer said in How to detect "user interface idiom" of a screen?:

@SGaist Grepping through the Qt5 header files I don't see any mention of the idea
of a phone UI versus a desktop UI.
Does Qt6 have such a differentiation?

No. Qt is cross-platform, it treats every device and screen the same. Check screen dimensions and pixel density to decide which UI to show.

At compile time, you do have some OS defines, like Q_OS_LINUX, Q_OS_ANDROID etc.

[mchinand]

You could first detect if the OS is Linux and then call some Linux-specific code to detect the release/Linux-flavor (e.g., check what's in '/etc/os-release'). If you find it's a PinePhone, then assume screen 0 is the phone's built-in display and everything else an external display.

[sierdzio]

@mchinand said in How to detect "user interface idiom" of a screen?:

then call some Linux-specific code to detect the release/Linux-flavor (e.g., check what's in '/etc/os-release').

No need, you can use QSysInfo for that.

[Publicnamer]

@sierdzio I've learned that the pinephone's screen 0 is called DSI-1. I assume it's named after Display Serial Interface.