Hi and welcome @AndyBig,
I agree and disagree with what @Fjodor and want to provide you a few more details - especially for the Nextion side since I don‘t know Stone too well. Click the sections to expand them.
Their Support
Indeed many people here have been pissed off in the past by acts of the Nextion Forum admins that were somewhere between highly restrictive and insulting. This has changed in the meantime and their current forum policies regarding reverse engineering are okay IMO (details here).
But, as the post linked above mentions, too, not everything is good. While they do provide in many cases it also happens regularly that they‘re… not so helpful. To give you an impression of what I mean I picked three fairly recent threads from their forum and you can judge for yourself how they handled the topics. Feel free to explore other topics, too.
https://nextion.tech/forums/topic/re-value-error-read-with-getvalue/
https://nextion.tech/forums/topic/garbage-string-at-startup/
https://nextion.tech/forums/topic/where-are-the-solidworks-models-for-the-displays/
Note that you have to create an account and log in to view the posts.
General Ease of Use
Nextion is simple. Basic functionality that‘s pretty easy to use. That makes simple-ish UIs very quick to develop. However, if you‘re going for complex UI‘s, you‘re still limited to the same, basic functions. They allow you to do a ton of things, but anything complex has to be cobbled together.
Couple examples:
- No math functions.
+-*/as well as shift/logic operators are available but nothing else. square root, trigonometric functions, power of x - all unavailable. Some people go through the trouble of implementing the required algorithms to calculate those functions but I strongly suggest to avoid such „hacks“ for productive development. - No global functions or global templates. Assume you did end up writing your own square root function, you cannot use it directly on all pages of your UI but you have to copy it to each page because there is no such thing as global code / functions. While variables can be global, visual stuff can‘t be global either. Meaning if you have a template design you need to copy that to all pages, too. And if you modify it, you have - again - to do it on all pages. Specific example: My Nextion project has about 8000 lines of code. 6000 are duplicates. That ratio is probably a bit higher than most projects but it‘s still a valid point IMO.
- Another missing math functionality are
( ). Yes. If you want to calculatea = b * (c + d)you have to manually writea = c + dfollowed bya *= b.
As I said this doesn‘t matter too much for smaller UIs (for which Nextion is quite good) but you wouldn‘t be the first one whose project evolved way past the point where Nextion is suited.
Don‘t forget that Nextion‘s value lies in the fact that you can develop a good UI quickly. If you‘re spending hours and hours on copy-pasting code to pages or working around limitations, then what‘s left of that advantage?
10inch Models Specifically
The Nextion intelligent series which is the only series offering 10" screens is quite a bit different from the others in the sense that it has much more functions like transparency, file system features, video capabilities, … However, all these features are „squeezed“ into an ecosystem and into a language that was made for a much less complicated/featured environment and IMO does hit the limits of what‘s reasonably possible with the Nextion concept.
One important thing is that the Nextion Intelligent series has a 200MHz processor instead of a 48 or 64MHz one like almost all other models. This does make animations, page transitions etc significantly smoother.
STONE
From the small amount of things I‘ve seen of STONE, it appears as if their ecosystem was not as easy to use but indeed more powerful and likely higher performance. They also seem to be specifically made for industrial applications - Nextion not so much.
Finally, STONE has joined the forum a while ago to promote their products. In case you haven‘t found those topics yet you might want to search for them. Maybe you can contact them, too, to get a bit of help with your editor issues.
Conclusion
I agree with fjodors recommendation to get as much first hand experience - on all topics. Support, Nextion development but also STONE development. None of the products is a general no-go but neither one is suited for every use case either.
Finally, you may also consider a „dumb“ screen together with a powerful library such as lvgl.
Kind regards,
Max