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Lubuntu is taking a new direction

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Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#171

Post by axaxs »

michaelmrose wrote: post #132
axaxs wrote: post #81

I don't understand the rationale behind a separate group/committee/website/idea for the same distro with different defaults. I worked with the Antergos team, a team of 4 people, to write a distro that let you pick and choose everything, from DE to browsers. While I've mainly faded away they are still hard at it. In short, if we can support nearly every DE with 4 volunteers, what are these *buntus spending their resou…

Antergos most emphatically isn't a distro it's just an installer for arch Linux and quite frankly a poorly designed one that does not always actually work. After the installer runs if it actually works you aren't left with something much different from a normal arch installation. The actual distro developers have a lot of work to do as far as assembling a wide range of components and often writing their own like pack…

Sorry, I don't follow. Your second paragraph is rather accurate. That said, I don't see how that's different from the various flavors of Ubuntu. I would consider Lubuntu an Ubuntu installer...

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#172

Post by mrob »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #20

I always loved Qt as a developer and hated it as a user. Every app/desktop environment written in it seem buggy and expensive on RAM. On the other side, I always loved GTK apps and their feel/design, but never got to make anything big myself in GTK. There are other points to this debate than RAM/Resources: Looks and feel, philosophy, feature bloatedness, etc.

I used to love GTK apps, but GTK3 has become almost unusable. I used XFCE for years, but now it's switched to GTK3 I've had to abandon it for LXDE (GTK2 version). Even something as simple as the XFCE text editor (Mousepad) now has pointless animations that you can't turn off and it constantly flickers unless you turn on compositing, which is useless latency increasing bloat. Everything about GTK3 feels like it was designed by somebody who'd rather be working on mobile apps. There's frequent animations deliberately wasting my time and distracting me, and excessive whitespace deliberately wasting my pixels. Maybe it's fixable with the complicated and unstable CSS based theming, but instead of fighting the system it would be easier to switch to Qt based apps. Qt at least appears to be designed for experienced users on desktops/laptops, not morons on phones.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#173

Post by yellowapple »

apatters wrote: post #101
asadjb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used Lubuntu other than trying it out a few times, so this is just going off of the content in the article. > This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus To me, it seems that they ran the numbers (kudos to them for taking an empirical approach) and figured out that their original USP was now no longer unique enough, and they need to do something d…

Yep that's a great point, maybe they are not communicating what the unique benefits of Lubuntu will be in the future, or maybe they don't actually know what they'll be. Right now Lubuntu's niche is really clear for me, if I want a lightweight, general purpose distro I use Xubuntu. If I want a really lightweight, general purpose distro I use Lubuntu. (A step beyond that if I wanted "so damn light there are probably a…

Re: Puppy and Damn Small: the former's still maintained, while the latter (last I checked) is not.

Another one to add to your list of tiny Linux distros is Tiny Core Linux, which is indeed tiny while being fully graphical.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#174

Post by yellowapple »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #139
exergy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But none of these seem to be different enough from the other great choices available as Ubuntu flavors Yep. "Gets out of the users way" is what a lot of Ubuntu's goals are about already.

Was that sarcasm?

Even at its worst (with Unity), I'd say Ubuntu does do a reasonably good job of staying out of users' way. Maybe not compared to other distros with lighter environments, but certainly compared to, say, Windows 10.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#175

Post by cpburns2009 »

apatters wrote: post #101
asadjb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used Lubuntu other than trying it out a few times, so this is just going off of the content in the article. > This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus To me, it seems that they ran the numbers (kudos to them for taking an empirical approach) and figured out that their original USP was now no longer unique enough, and they need to do something d…

Yep that's a great point, maybe they are not communicating what the unique benefits of Lubuntu will be in the future, or maybe they don't actually know what they'll be. Right now Lubuntu's niche is really clear for me, if I want a lightweight, general purpose distro I use Xubuntu. If I want a really lightweight, general purpose distro I use Lubuntu. (A step beyond that if I wanted "so damn light there are probably a…

I think it's becoming the Qt (via LXQt) competitor to the GTK3 (via Xfce) Xubuntu.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#176

Post by coleifer »

While it's true that you can run plain-old Ubuntu on a 10-year-old machine without problems, the growth in popularity of smaller ARM processors (rpi etc) also creates demand for a lightweight linux distro. When I read the title I assumed that Lubuntu's new direction was to move towards offering better support for such devices. Guess they're going the opposite direction...too bad.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#177

Post by laumars »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #153
asadjb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used Lubuntu other than trying it out a few times, so this is just going off of the content in the article. > This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus To me, it seems that they ran the numbers (kudos to them for taking an empirical approach) and figured out that their original USP was now no longer unique enough, and they need to do something d…

That's Linux Desktop distributions in a nutshell though isn't it? None of them are really different enough from Ubuntu to be noteworthy. Personally, I think the fact that so many minor-variant distros exist is all the evidence you need that Linux is a terrible platform for customization, because if it were simple to customize everyone would just use Ubuntu and make their own changes, but instead you get all these dis…

I respectfully disagree with that. In my opinion the point of the different *buntus is convenience for beginners rather than solving hard problems. To that end I have taken Ubuntu machines at work and installed KDE and the whole process took no more than a few minutes and was pretty painless. But that's not necessarily something that a Linux n00b might realise they could do (nor even want to try)

If you look at any of the more "hands on" distros then you might find a couple of themed variations, but generally users will just recommend you install the base distro and change your personalisations yourself. As an aside I went through a phase of running a different DE/WM each week on ArchLinux. Never had any issues there.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#178

Post by _arvin »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #79
mrdmnd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember, http://funroll-loops.teurasporsaat.org/

So... always use `-O0 -march=i586`, because using obvious optimizations for your hardware is a total waste of time and will definitely never ever be beneficial? Seriously, I get that it's possible to go off the deep end over optimizing, but that site is way off the deep end in the opposite direction.

I'm sure it was just poking fun. We can't be kernel ricers and get mad when people make fun of it. CFLAGS matter! lol

One thing I will say, compiling your own has many benefits, as all the distribution kernels use Generic x86-64 and miss out on all the Intel/AMD optimizations.

For example, just by switching from "Generic-x86-64" to "Core 2 or newer" in Processor type and features -> Processor family in kernel config, adds these 5 optimizations:

CONFIG_X86_INTERNODE_CACHE_SHIFT=6

CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_SHIFT=6

CONFIG_X86_INTEL_USERCOPY=y

CONFIG_X86_USE_PPRO_CHECKSUM=y

CONFIG_X86_P6_NOP=y

You can say it's pulling hairs, but hey, that's what I want. Not many people have the time, know-how, run Linux, etc. to be able to make these optimizations.

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#179

Post by [deleted] »

pweissbrod wrote: post #160
apatters wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep that's a great point, maybe they are not communicating what the unique benefits of Lubuntu will be in the future, or maybe they don't actually know what they'll be. Right now Lubuntu's niche is really clear for me, if I want a lightweight, general purpose distro I use Xubuntu. If I want a really lightweight, general purpose distro I use Lubuntu. (A step beyond that if I wanted "so damn light there are probably a…

In my experience such "lightweight" distros, over time, accumulate expanded functionality/compatibility/surface area and inevitably/gradually become "heavier". Then the community complains "X" is too heavy, we need a lightweight system! and the cycle repeats itself.

[deleted]

Re: Lubuntu is taking a new direction

#180

Post by zanny »

hd4 wrote: post #127

This says more about how efficient KDE has become than how LXQt is performing, if they're feeling like KDE is eating LXQts lunch. I know people want choice and all, but I think we have reached the point where it would make sense for KDE to replace all other DEs purely for its sheer flexibility and performance. With every other DE there is some trade-off, usually in resource usage. KDE at start-up uses under 500mb wit…

Additionally there are only three major memory hogs in KDE:

Akonadi, purely associated with the KDEPim stuff. You can just uninstall it all without a fuss.

Baloo, the file scanner. You can disable this outright.

Plasmashell, which is the desktop applet engine. This is where I feel LXQT can find its niche, by providing a simpler shell that uses less resources than the plasmoid JS script container style the Plasma Shell uses.

Without any of these running a KDE desktop with system services etc included is under 200MB, often under 100MB.

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