Introduction

I recently had the joy of being handed a Mac laptop running QtCreator inside of a VM in order to demonstrate my 1337 QML skills. The VM was dog slow, and it was not hard to see why; GPU hardware acceleration was disabled. being a rocket scientist, one immediately enables video acceleration and is promptly rewarded with (a) black window(s) where Qt Creator’s aspecto is meant to present itself. Awesome.

Solution

Luckily there is a solution:

export QMLSCENE_DEVICE=softwarecontext

prior to running Qt Creator in your VM, and you are cooking with gas. (as documented here)

If it seems counter intuitive to you to enable hardware acceleration only to use software rasterization in the sole application you are running, then you are suffering from a sever case of over rationality. I suggest a beer and maybe ratifying it.