LXQt 0.11 Released

The point of XDG isn't about a particular user experience, it's about cross-desktop compatibility. If you lose the two biggest desktops, then it's doomed to uselessness. Like a W3C that Mozilla and Google don't listen to.

The first step of standardization is to get the people with the most pull to care. The problem is nobody cares anymore.

I also took it on me to stop slacking off and give LXQt a shot, and damn I loved it.

I'm currently using Xfce+bspwm but I'm swapping out Xfce for LXQt in a day or two and will hopefully start contributing and put my time to good use.

Thank you (and the other LXQt contributors) for all the effort you've put into the project.

1. The linux desktop has been reworked so hard and so many times to try and attract and accomodate those good ol' "my mom uses linux!" as a means of obtaining critical mass for the other things (drivers, well-polished software, ...). The few that this model attract are equally fine with their smartphone and a laptop built around a browser.

2. From (1), it is not even an attractive target for dev- work. I used Linux as a my main "desktop" from the days of downloading slackware over BBS in the early 90ies up until I was introduced to OSX around 10.4. I tried going back after Apple making it increasingly more awful after 10.6. I hated every minute of it - all the things I hated with new OSX was replicated, poorly. an endless stream of internal frustration "no I don't want to automount this usb stick what is wrong with you?", "why is my volume settings jumping around", "yes I plugged in a device, I don't need to be notified that I did what I did please shut up", "oh so two audio feeds with different sample rates are a no go?", "my mouse is low on batteries? I'm not using it, it's not even connected?", "hotplug monitor? enjoy panic and reboot", "I know there's updates to be had, there's always updates to be had, fuck off - daddy's working". I waste more time turning things off than I previously ever had to do turning things on. Now my (non-NIH) regular linux desktop use is confined to VMs that I just reset from template, do my thing and then murder.

3. Not even 'cool' anymore. The 'fragmentation' of the desktop was an attractive feature to young me. Jumping between WindowMaker to Enlightenment to KDE opened a lot of ideas as to what this thing could be used for, I enjoyed tinkering (still do, but not on this chimera). Now they are all convering into mostly the same confused pig but with different shades of lipstick. The same useless animations and effects and none of the useful ones.

"We" lost the mobile race (and never really took to participating) and payed the price with what is effectively a kernel fork. There's a good chance that VR can actually turn into the next "Desktop" (displays are nearly there, eyetrackers, haptic gloves etc. incoming) to make the browser look more pathetic. How many projects are seriously working on it, or is that already lost?

Random crashes of random "ksomething" components, announced with a cheerful dialog with a cute icon (I've had these crashes upon a first login of a newly created user, how low is that?), the little activity chooser widget expanding and collapsing itself in top-right corner over and over, audio devices appearing and disappearing semi-randomly whenever KDE tries to play one of its sound effects, Just a few days ago, after upgrade to latest plasma, all my systray icons are double in size, and thus no longer neatly in two rows. I'm not a half-blind grandpa, or a smartphone user, I don't need icons the size of my thumbs! The systray widget _is_ still able to display smaller icons, when I make the panel narrower, but the only way I can get two rows of icons anymore is to make it so wide that two rows of these large icons can fit.

Just yesterday, I tried creating a new user account with the intent of starting out with a fresh configuration and recreating my customizations, to get rid of old cruft (KDE doesn't seem to handle upgrades from previous versions very well, e.g. I lost the right-click menu on empty desktop somewhere around plasma 5.4). I got crash on first start, text in various systemsettings sections not redrawing properly when scrolling, "desktop settings" menu item always produces two (!) dialogs side by side, probably because I have two monitors active, KDE sometimes starting into a black screen with no controls visible... Not a very good first impression for a new user.

I'm now suffering KDE until I can get something else going and configured to my workflow. LXQt is something I'm looking at primarily, since I like the idea, and also like to write code for Qt. Hopefully I'll even be able to contribute eventually.

But yeah - KDE is circling the drain from a regular desktop user's point of view. Although it's still usable, it's the thousand little cuts that will get you.

I tried damn near every combination of desktop environment and window manager on my RPi, hoping that someone had fixed this issue since the last time I tried running a Linux system. In the end I settled on LXQt as the best of the bunch, but it still isn't a good experience.