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qlaunch-ext, part 1
Note: It is highly reccomended to read this blog post by XorTroll for more context
Before I started making homebrew for Switch I was intrested in home menu replacements. I tried uLaunch, and found it to be a good alternative to the stock menu. (SwitchU didn't exist at the time, this was late 2023 after all). But I never kept using it for a few reasons:
- Ulaunch is very slow. Opening the home menu is slow, reopening it is slow
- It doesn't have much functionality. To change a lot of settings that I frequently want to change I would have to reboot
- I don't like the visuals (we are programmers, not UI designers after all!)
So when I learned C/C++ and how to make my own homebrew a replacement for qlaunch (stock home menu) was something I wanted to do. But since I was doing stuff with HOC I never got around to it. When I did get intrested in it again, a new option had come up. SwitchU. However, even though it had far superior visuals, it was still slow and lacked functionality. It also used Liquid Glass visuals, which I hate a lot. It also uses a lot of GPU and is prone to freezing issues.
So, after being frustrated with both these options I just made my own..
So introducing qlaunch-ext (Yes, naming is my passion)
qlaunch-ext is a modular and extendable reimplementation of the home menu. It aims to fix all the shortcoming of the previous launchers.
The main one which is fixed is speed. Qlaunch-ext is insanely fast and lightweight. This is because other launchers essentially opened the album with homebrew to actually render, while qlaunch-ext does not do this.
Qlaunch-ext also has a plugin interface, allowing for features like FTP, MTP and more.
Menus are also swappable and written in C++. You copy over a menu dnro (Dynamic NRO to use with my custom libnx dynamic linker), and you have a new menu.
Menus have full access to deko3d (and maybe OpenGL/Vulkan in the future).
So with this, I am working on a new menu implementation. It is incomplete, but is going along rather well.
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