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LXQt 0.11 Released

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Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#61

Post by scrollaway »

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…

Please, please don't take this the wrong way because, even if I personally don't like the direction KDE has taken, I have a lot of respect for the project...

But you're really talking about KDE here. Not linux. You have the context of a KDE developer. You're basically saying "The KDE project is doing great!", but that doesn't invalidate anything I said in my comment.

I've been dealing with the evangelism portion a ton more; what I've seen is that people no longer care.

Linux support for some of the newer tech is abysmal. Take for example hi-dpi and touch screen support; we're only now starting to get somewhere with both of those, and those don't even qualify as "newer tech". Things like UEFI have truly made Linux harder to install and deal with. We're going to catch up eventually but in the mean time, for users it's a terrible experience.

Desktop devs are so focused on their "experience" within the DE. Tell me, who's working on making GNOME/KDE apps look good on KDE/GNOME? Who's working on making them behave well? The rare times there's activity in XDG, it's "FYI" activity. "Hey, so, we're doing this in (gnome/kde) now. Comments welcome, whatever." - nobody ever replies. I worked for over a year on porting Android intents to XDG. Nobody helped. The GNOME project showed some interest in it; some good stuff came out of that, but intents are still not on Linux and, in 2016, it's still not possible to do something as simple as an "Edit this picture" action.

It's been a frustrating past few years. I saw a massive amount of new people interested in Linux, because "Windows 8 sucks". I also saw most of them go to macOS instead; the few that stayed went back to Windows when 10 was released. Linux really missed the boat there.

We are lacking a project that is actively working on the health of "Linux on the desktop". We need people to work on improving the experience of developing apps on Linux, improving the portability across desktops, creating clear specs, guidelines and documentation and we need all that not to suck. But who's going to do that? Mozilla doesn't seem interested. Valve, RH etc only have to care about the distro/DE they're shipping. Google's no longer looking at Linux as anything else than a kernel. Yeah, we're pretty screwed.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#62

Post by sho_hn »

scrollaway wrote: post #61
sho_hn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Please, please don't take this the wrong way because, even if I personally don't like the direction KDE has taken, I have a lot of respect for the project... But you're really talking about KDE here. Not linux. You have the context of a KDE developer. You're basically saying "The KDE project is doing great!", but that doesn't invalidate anything I said in my comment. I've been dealing with the evangelism portion a to…

> Take for example hi-dpi and touch screen support; we're only now starting to get somewhere with both of those, and those don't even qualify as "newer tech".

Hi-dpi is something we were pretty much done with one-two years ago (modulo per-screen dpi, which we need Wayland for).

> Tell me, who's working on making GNOME/KDE apps look good on KDE/GNOME?

Well, we've developed GTK+ versions of both of our last default looks (Oxygen and Breeze) and tried pretty hard to get to an agreement with the GTK+ guys on the window decos issue - it's true we're a bit disappointed how the latter went. I share your concerns about lack of cooperation, actually!

> But who's going to do that?

The same people who've always done that: You and me. I prefer rolling up my sleeve vs. waiting for a savior ...

For me the metric is simple, really:

- Is the Linux desktop still needed? Today more than ever.

- Is the Linux desktop today still better than one year ago? Yes.

As long as I have positive answers to those, I'll just keep working.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#63

Post by lj3 »

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…

> Drivers on Linux have always been like this, that's not the issue.

What are you basing that on? Drivers on Linux have always been like this and Desktop Linux has always been DOA. OS X is a Linux based operating system that fixed this issue and linux users went to it in droves. You don't see the correlation?

> The real issue is that modern line-of-business application development (which is where the money is) has left the desktop for good.

I agree, the shrinking amount of money that can be made in the Desktop space is an issue. Or at least it's an issue that that's how people see it these days; microsoft is doing just fine with enterprise software licensing and I know more than a few $1M+ revenue line of business software businesses that are not saas based.

In any case, there is a solution for that: go the apple route and make the Linux Distro specifically for a new laptop. The state of laptop hardware these days sucks. It's all commodity junk, even the Thinkpads. Trying to push commodity hardware when the commodity crowd has gone to mobile is a losing strategy, as evidenced by decreasing sales year after year.

There's space for a high quality PC laptop that caters to the power user crowd, including a linux based OS with working drivers and a pleasant UI.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#64

Post by lj3 »

brusch64 wrote: post #36
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…

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…

You name it, I've had issues with it. From the Intel audio card in my Thinkpad w530 to the Creative Soundblaster in my radio station's automation tower. I've never used a USB audio interface with Linux, but bluetooth audio on linux has a massive delay. In fairness, that delay is also present on OS X. For whatever reason, Windows is the only OS that will stream audio across bluetooth in real time.

It's possible the issue isn't with the audio drivers themselves but with PulseAudio and ALSA, which are both huge, steaming pile of shit. I just assumed PulseAudio and ALSA were both bad because of bad driver support and not because nobody in the linux ecosystem knows how to write an audio system.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#66

Post by scrollaway »

fredmorcos wrote: post #37
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…

So, you quite clearly know absolutely nothing about the situation LXQt was in, yet here you are telling me what I should have done?

Like majewsky said, Qt was and still is so far ahead of GTK it's completely unreal. But you're also not factoring in the fact that LXDE already existed for 10 years, and we moved that off GTK. LXQt is a continuation of it all.

I pushed really hard in favour of KDE frameworks. I specifically pushed for kwin to be a bit more independent, and we got that. LXQt was a driving force behind the need for KDE apps to become less tied to their own desktop. LXQt, today, is using several libraries from KDE which were duplicated in the ecosystem before that (eg. Solid, kidletime, kwindowsystem).

We worked so much on reducing fragmentation. Do you think I'd be bitching about it and then undermining my own efforts?

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#67

Post by scrollaway »

pferde wrote: post #27
scrollaway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm being a bit unfair on KDE. Their efforts on Frameworks are excellent. Kwin especially is an amazing thing. But as a desktop , it's a disaster. Bloated, awful UX. Nearly every "core" app basically depends on the entire desktop, which makes them unusable outside of it. Bleh.

Correction: their efforts _used to be_ excellent, and I've been a big fan since KDE2. But lately, the whole plasma desktop feels like it will topple over and fall if I so much as look at it funny. 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 e…

Please don't hesitate to email me (jerome at leclan dot ch) if you are interested in contributing to LXQt. Any help is appreciated, even if you can dedicate a few hours a month.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#68

Post by ac29 »

qznc wrote: post #38
a3n wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 for…

>(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

All of those are possible with XFCE. Technically I think the mute/unmute thing comes through ACPI or something -- it works in any DE I've used.

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#69

Post by digi_owl »

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…

Best i can tell, this has come to be because XDG/Freedesktop stopped being about specs and became all about code.

Rather than cook up a protocol spec between high level and low level, they write a -kit/-d (more and more often these days as part of the systemd shoggoth) and makes its APIs (that are subject to change from version to version) the "protocol spec".

And most of this gets prototyped over at Fedora, by RH employees...

Re: LXQt 0.11 Released

#70

Post by alphapapa »

scrollaway wrote: post #21
alphapapa wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'm glad to hear someone like you (a DE developer) say these things. GNOME went off the rails years ago, and KDE seems to be headed that way with KDE 5 (or is it Plasma 5? or Frameworks 5? or...? Just KDE 5!). I'll be keeping an eye on LXQt. In the meantime, KDE 4 still serves me pretty well. Dolphin is a fantastic file manager for when you need a GUI, and KWin is a great window manager. And KHotkeys makes conf…

> Maybe a new XDG-NG could be formed by LXQt, Cinnamon, MATE, and TDE, the DEs that seem to be the most sane, focused on stability and usefulness. 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 peo…

> 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.

I don't think it would be useless. If GNOME and KDE don't care anymore, then move on without them. Lead the way with the people who do care. Eventually your work will surpass theirs, and they will either join you, follow you, or fall into obscurity.

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

I think the first step of standardization is to standardize. ;) If the DE projects I mentioned got together and defined useful standards and started using them, if they started solving real problems that they and other DEs experience, then the big two would naturally be attracted to the new standards and solutions.

But even if GNOME and KDE never came around, you still have four or five DEs (with the potential for more) that have useful interoperability. I think that would be valuable.

Possible elephant in the room: Red Hat/Fedora. My impression is that XDG is dominated by GNOME which is dominated by Red Hat. They have shown in many ways how little they care about users, standards, and stability. Time to leave them in the dust. Blaze a new trail for desktop Linux without them! ;)

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