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LXQt 0.11 Released

lxqt.org

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Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#51

Post by n3storm »

n3storm wrote: post #50
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…

Same old song, pal. I have been using XFCE since long time ago, no big changes, very few bugs, no bloat, no propaganda or vaporware. It's solid, it works, it's light on resources, it's configurable (I have made mine look like Mac OS 9 and BeOS). I just hope (crossing fingers) moving to GTK3 doesn't mean visual bugs.

Also, I added compton for candy effects. It would be great if XFCE integrated compton or more compositing features, but not absolutelly necessary.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#52

Post by nabla9 »

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 may be silly question but what is behind the interest of developing new Linux desktops?

I have been using Unix/Linux from early 90's and desktops have always been fine most of the time. twm was fine, UDE was fine, FVWM was fine, I would be using them even today except that I'm lazy and satisfied with what comes out of the box. There is different types of eye candy and taskbars etc. but why are they so important? Interaction is not faster or easier than it was before. Configuration is easier but you don't need new desktop for that.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#53

Post by majewsky »

pzone wrote: post #48
majewsky wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially disappointed with the clusterfuck KDE has become... Can you elaborate? I'm on Plasma 5 and quite satisfied with it, though my use of KDE applications has constantly declined over the years. (Which has nothing to do with KDE specifically, just with my workflow becoming more and more CLI-centric over the years.)

I was a bit surprised by that line as well. I mean of course KDE is going to be behind GNOME in general since it is a bit more volunteer centric with less corporate funding, but I don't think it's in bad shape at all, and it is my preferred desktop environment. Many individual KDE projects are open-source gems. (Krita, Kdenlive, Dolphin, KDE Connect)

KDE Connect is easily the one desktop application that adds the most value for me in day-to-day use, on the scale of "How could I ever live without this?"

(Although it would be nicer if it were a desktop-agnostic "Linux Connect", but the sad state of XDG means that this might never happen.)

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#54

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#55

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#56

Post by [deleted] »

keyle wrote: post #5
scrollaway wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like you can't make desktop development "sexy", though. You could , but we're not there yet. Qt is a pretty amazing framework (yes, I'm biased). You can write apps in Python, but Python is a clusterfuck for shipping anything cross-platform or any kind of desktop apps. My vision for LXQt was to very much have a modern desktop (targeting recent tech such as fingerprint readers, wayland etc), while retaining so…

Yes I really like your vision of desktop. And I'm not saying desktop dev is unsexy. I'm a designer/ux/ui developer. There is tons of sexy stuff to do. Just look at the VFX of scifi movies and take cues ( http://www.aspenexcel.com/ ), desktop is stuck in the past and could move forward. What I meant is: the code base is ancient to them. The unsexy monolithic code base that's not running on the cloud and doesn't emulat…

[deleted]

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#57

Post by cutthehypocris »

keyle wrote: post #5
scrollaway wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like you can't make desktop development "sexy", though. You could , but we're not there yet. Qt is a pretty amazing framework (yes, I'm biased). You can write apps in Python, but Python is a clusterfuck for shipping anything cross-platform or any kind of desktop apps. My vision for LXQt was to very much have a modern desktop (targeting recent tech such as fingerprint readers, wayland etc), while retaining so…

Yes I really like your vision of desktop. And I'm not saying desktop dev is unsexy. I'm a designer/ux/ui developer. There is tons of sexy stuff to do. Just look at the VFX of scifi movies and take cues ( http://www.aspenexcel.com/ ), desktop is stuck in the past and could move forward. What I meant is: the code base is ancient to them. The unsexy monolithic code base that's not running on the cloud and doesn't emulat…

> Younger developers

Let's not put all the fault on "younger developers".

I agree with you completely when you say that nowadays developers care more about new and shiny JS/ROR frameworks than anything else, because they are easy to use and allow them to ship thing overnight and possibly make even a bunch of money out of it.

But let's talk for a moment about the "grand pa's" efforts to welcome new developers. I speak out of personal experience here. In the past, when I was a very young and very new to development, with a limitless willingness to learn and help out doing my part in open source (and, more importantly, limitless time to do it), many of my attempts at trying to collaborate -- two of the most notable and worst experiences on my side being Tox and Fedora -- ended up with me getting mocked for even trying. And when I say mocked I mean it. I wasn't just normally (or, to use a blasphemous word, politely) turned down, which I would have understood. Someone of the Fedora project, when I had attempted to take part in an initiative intended to attract new developers, even went the extra mile basically telling me to go get screwed because I had never contributed before.

This happened when I was around 16 or something. Now I'm 27 and it takes a huge effort on my part to even just consider contributing to "old guard" open source projects. Nowadays, I still would never dare to participate in mailing lists/IRC channels because I'm still too afraid of being treated that way again.

I'm not trying to start a flame war. I just wish everybody would be more self-critic.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#58

Post by sho_hn »

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…

> 2016 was the year the Linux desktop died

As a Plasma dev, honestly, we couldn't feel more different right now. I've been hacking on KDE for 12 years now, and this year has been one of the best. Here's where we're at:

* We're about to ship Plasma 5.8, which will be the first LTS release of the Plasma 5 product. It's been an incredibly satisfying dev cycle, where we really hunkered down and spent a few months on performance optimizations, robustness (especially around multiscreen) and fit and finish (our design guys did an awesome job). There's not a doubt in my mind that this is the best version of the KDE desktop we've ever released.

* We've significantly professionalized our engineering/process story in the last two-three years. All of our new code has really high test coverage, we're increasingly expanding test coverage of our older code, we've got better habits on code review, we've got real meeting cycles, etc. I'm pretty confident about calling some of our new code best-of-class - e.g. our kwayland lib is the best-tested Wayland implementation around, period.

* We've been able to do the above things despite having ongoing porting churn (the Wayland transition), which is a process challenge we failed pretty badly in the past (the KDE 3->4 transition). We've learned a lot about how to manage ourselves, and most of the work we've done for Wayland has directly improved the quality of the X11 experience as well. Every time we've had to rewrite something we've asked ourselves what other goals we can hit at the same time that deliver concrete value to users.

tl;dr We think what we do now is the best we've ever done, and that we get better year-over-year while living up to our original goals. And we're not about to stop.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#59

Post by zaggynl »

sho_hn wrote: post #58
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…

> 2016 was the year the Linux desktop died As a Plasma dev, honestly, we couldn't feel more different right now. I've been hacking on KDE for 12 years now, and this year has been one of the best. Here's where we're at: * We're about to ship Plasma 5.8, which will be the first LTS release of the Plasma 5 product. It's been an incredibly satisfying dev cycle, where we really hunkered down and spent a few months on perf…

Thanks for all the work, love Plasma on openSUSE Tumbleweed so far, keep going!

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#60

Post by anothermouse »

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've been watching this happen like a scheduled car crash for years. Every 2 years, another open source project succumbs to the problem.

As far as I can tell, when software is open source, the barrier to people contributing is lower. And that leads to a sort of brownian jitter in the system. Once great systems, (kde in general and amarok in particular) suffer from contributions of new features, which add features but decrease reliability. Or they exist for so long that no new exciting features exist to be added, so the inevitable re-architecture death march begins (I'm looking at your kde4. You killed kde as a corporate desktop, so that you could add semantic search?).

Whatever the cause, be it the accretion of "features", or the inevitable "rinse, re-architect, repeat" cycle some project are on, it can only drive people away. But a project that is widely used collects developers, and it is difficult to say no to contributors - a common problem in volunteer projects outside software.

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