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LXQt 0.11 Released

lxqt.org

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Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#31

Post by reddotX »

keyle wrote: post #3
scrollaway wrote: post #2

So while this is on HN, I wanted to talk a bit about LXQt and desktop OSes in general. Context: I'm one of the original leads on LXQt, and I initiated the merge of Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt into LXQt. I've been using LXQt as my main desktop for several years now. I've kept up with what other desktops have been doing. I've been especially impressed by the efforts of the GNOME team, and especially disappointed with the clus…

I feel it's somewhat a deeper change. Older developers are getting kids and have very limited / no time to allocate for open source development (unsupported financially). Younger developers are chasing the golden goose on the web/mobile, or banging frameworks until sunrise. They feel like old c++ codebase etc. are like old ruins, in deep dark caverns. They wouldn't touch any of it. They're anti-mailing-list and pro-s…

i'm old and i never liked mailing lists

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#32

Post by dvdkon »

starky wrote: post #29
scrollaway wrote: post #2

So while this is on HN, I wanted to talk a bit about LXQt and desktop OSes in general. Context: I'm one of the original leads on LXQt, and I initiated the merge of Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt into LXQt. I've been using LXQt as my main desktop for several years now. I've kept up with what other desktops have been doing. I've been especially impressed by the efforts of the GNOME team, and especially disappointed with the clus…

The structure of Linux is really its worst enemy, having everything be a separate package results in a terrible end user experience, exacerbated by the developer fragmentation you mention. The only way to get a good looking and usable system is full top to bottom integration of the entire desktop environment. There are a few that try, but in the end you are running GTK and/or Qt, both of which are hideous and stick o…

What's wrong with Qt? Apart from how big it is, I think it's the best GUI toolkit around.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#33

Post by pjmlp »

scrollaway wrote: post #2

So while this is on HN, I wanted to talk a bit about LXQt and desktop OSes in general. Context: I'm one of the original leads on LXQt, and I initiated the merge of Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt into LXQt. I've been using LXQt as my main desktop for several years now. I've kept up with what other desktops have been doing. I've been especially impressed by the efforts of the GNOME team, and especially disappointed with the clus…

This is why I went back to Windows and sadly look back with hindsight to my GNU/Linux desktop days as time lost where I could have instead have taken advantage of my game development skills, instead of switching between desktops and graphic libraries all the time. When I started using GNU/Linux SVGALib (using root) was the only API available.

Mac OS X is the only same alternative, at least for me.

The main problem is that GNU/Linux wars have replaced the UNIX wars of the 90's.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#34

Post by pjmlp »

toyg wrote: post #14
lj3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Desktop Linux has bigger issues than UI toolkits. That's probably one of the reasons why you're having difficulty getting developers interested. I, personally, wouldn't contribute any time to a UI toolkit or desktop environment until some of the more egregious problems facing the linux desktop get resolved, if they ever can be. There's an ugly catch-22 that's been playing itself out in the linux ecosystem for a while…

> it can't get more users without better drivers Drivers on Linux have always been like this, that's not the issue. The real issue is that modern line-of-business application development (which is where the money is) has left the desktop for good. Windows has the same problem. It's not the Linux desktop that is dying, it's "the desktop" as a concept. Desktop vendors are sandboxing everything to death, for security re…

Windows desktop is doing just fine on the enterprise.

Lots of projects delivering WPF and Qt based applications, for those after them.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#35

Post by red_admiral »

How much of this is due to fragementatation/walled-garden mentalities, and how much due to issues with the C++/OOP-style API that most GUI/widget toolkits seem to share? With fragmentation as a consequence of everyone exploring their own solution to a genuine problem.

I'd say that the object-oriented style of GTK/wx/Qt/you name it is inherently hard to use cleanly in a language like lua - not that it can't be done but you constantly feel like "there must be a better way to do this". And then the kid next door shows you a HTML5 interface that just makes you go "wow", and the same again when he tells you he built it in 5 minutes. (The wow effect wears off quickly enough once you try such "arcane" things as keyboard shortcuts, or even getting a consistent TAB order half the time.)

It seems to me like everyone has realised that we need something better than writing python while thinking in C++, and everyone's experimenting with their own solution - hence why we have meta-object compilers and g-introspection and whatnot. Perhaps that's necessary because I don't think anyone has made a really good 21st century dynamic-language desktop application API yet that's almost as quick to work in as electron, but gets things right. Possibly with a sprinkle of functional programming and some kind of async thrown in.

You can't blame gnome 3 for not trying, but the amount of custom undocumented CSS you need to hack on to do something like picking an accent colour for the currently selected control make me think this is a really good learning example of how not to do it.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#36

Post by brusch64 »

lj3 wrote: post #11
scrollaway wrote: post #2

So while this is on HN, I wanted to talk a bit about LXQt and desktop OSes in general. Context: I'm one of the original leads on LXQt, and I initiated the merge of Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt into LXQt. I've been using LXQt as my main desktop for several years now. I've kept up with what other desktops have been doing. I've been especially impressed by the efforts of the GNOME team, and especially disappointed with the clus…

Desktop Linux has bigger issues than UI toolkits. That's probably one of the reasons why you're having difficulty getting developers interested. I, personally, wouldn't contribute any time to a UI toolkit or desktop environment until some of the more egregious problems facing the linux desktop get resolved, if they ever can be. There's an ugly catch-22 that's been playing itself out in the linux ecosystem for a while…

Which audio cards do you mean exactly ?

I'm pretty happy with most of the newer USB audio interfaces, as they happen to be more and more class compliant, so you don't need a seperate driver for it. I'm using the Presonus AudioBox 1818. It works fine with Linux, but I can't use the internal mixing engine. Would be fine if that worked, but is not that important for me.

What I really like about Linux drivers is that if they work, they won't get obsolete so quickly. I've had more luck with old supported hardware on Linux than on newer Windows versions. I also don't miss all the crapware that comes with some Windows drivers. I am looking at you Nvidia - I just want my monitor to work, I don't need 10 tools for my third monitor.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#37

Post by fredmorcos »

scrollaway wrote: post #2

So while this is on HN, I wanted to talk a bit about LXQt and desktop OSes in general. Context: I'm one of the original leads on LXQt, and I initiated the merge of Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt into LXQt. I've been using LXQt as my main desktop for several years now. I've kept up with what other desktops have been doing. I've been especially impressed by the efforts of the GNOME team, and especially disappointed with the clus…

> Almost nobody actually collaborates on anything. Everybody wants to do their own thing and it leads to developer fragmentation. Every project is undermanned. LXQt is especially undermanned right now. The Cinnamon guys, last I heard, want to switch to Qt but don't have the developers to do it and would end up being a LXQt clone.

As an example, instead of starting another desktop project (lxde, razor-qt, lxqt), some could have contributed to or collaborated with xfce.

> Nobody needs that many desktops, especially when nearly all of them are clones of each other in either GTK or Qt and 95% of the apps duplicate each others' functionality.

In a way like lxde, razor-qt, lxqt in relation to xfce.

Seems like you've contributed quite a bit to the fragmentation, coming back and preaching collaboration will at best only fix part of the problem.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#38

Post by qznc »

a3n wrote: post #7
scrollaway wrote: post #2

So while this is on HN, I wanted to talk a bit about LXQt and desktop OSes in general. Context: I'm one of the original leads on LXQt, and I initiated the merge of Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt into LXQt. I've been using LXQt as my main desktop for several years now. I've kept up with what other desktops have been doing. I've been especially impressed by the efforts of the GNOME team, and especially disappointed with the clus…

> Most people who care about their desktop have migrated or are migrating to OSX I'm not among the most people. I don't care about my desktop, and I've migrated away from all the focus on appearance to tiling window managers, currently awesome. I almost never see my desktop, I just want my windows. I'm not a "the mouse is evil, twm's are efficient," I just got fed up with all the focus on the desktop. I don't care, I…

I live in terminal and browser almost exclusively, but I still want a full desktop environment. I switched to Mate on my old laptop, because Unity and Gnome3 need to much resources. I tried others (XFCE, LXDE, ...) but they lacked little features like:

* hibernate when closing lid

* cpu/mem/network visualization in top/bottom bar

* clean theme without much fiddling

* mute/unmute via hardware button

And the rest I forgot. I can live with some issues, but it compounds on the less popular DEs.

All those issue apply to Awesome as well. DE is much more than managing windows. A long time ago, I used various tiling window managers, but always ran the various Gnome background services as well.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#39

Post by qznc »

sudhirkhanger wrote: post #24

Any of you use a lightweight desktop environment like on high end expensive system. Why? Does it matter if you end up using lightweight desktop environment on a low end system and end up using resource intensive apps on top of it?

I recently switch to Mate (the Gnome2 fork), because it requires less memory than Ubuntu Unity and Gnome3. My old laptop has 4GB RAM it I often its the limit when compiling stuff and maybe running a VM.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#40

Post by Jean-Philipe »

scrollaway wrote: post #2

So while this is on HN, I wanted to talk a bit about LXQt and desktop OSes in general. Context: I'm one of the original leads on LXQt, and I initiated the merge of Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt into LXQt. I've been using LXQt as my main desktop for several years now. I've kept up with what other desktops have been doing. I've been especially impressed by the efforts of the GNOME team, and especially disappointed with the clus…

I agree - but on the other hand, I feel desktop is in a bad place in general. I'm a regular macOS user and I miss the Linux days, will probably install Linux on my Mac again. macOS incredibly glitchy and unstable (at least for me), and I'm not happy with the usability either. Windows doesn't look like a valid option at all to me. Had to use Windows 10 to fix some bugs the other day. No.

So, while the Linux desktop is probably in a very bad place, it's not so bad if you compare it to the other two alternatives.

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