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LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

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Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#71

Post by theGimp »

wtracy wrote: post #40
WoodenChair wrote: post #35

The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…

http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/ http://windowmaker.org/

Funny, I've been looking for something like ratpoison for a while, and though the name seems familiar, I had never tried it before.

I'm using it now... I think my search is over :)

Thank you!

Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#72

Post by andrewstuart »

wtracy wrote: post #40
WoodenChair wrote: post #35

The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…

http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/ http://windowmaker.org/

They all look clunky and unrefined.

Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#73

Post by pyre »

theGimp wrote: post #71
wtracy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/ http://awesome.naquadah.org/ http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/ http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/ http://windowmaker.org/

Funny, I've been looking for something like ratpoison for a while, and though the name seems familiar, I had never tried it before. I'm using it now... I think my search is over :) Thank you!

Take a look at StumpWM. IIRC it's done by the author of ratpoison.

Bonus: If you're an Emacs user the interface/keyboard shortcuts should make you feel at home (or so I've heard).

Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#74

Post by Lunatic666 »

What about making a new Desktop not only fast, but also pretty? All the Linux Desktops look butt-ugly compared to OS X or even Windows 8 and absolutely don't make we want to give it a try. A nicely designed Desktop which is also fast and uses less resources would help getting Linux on the Desktops so much more...

Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#75

Post by hyperion2010 »

So I have been using fluxbox for 7 years now and it does nearly everything I need. There is one feature that I have been looking for that I have not seen in any window manager that I know: the ability to group windows so that they raise and lower together. Yes I have virtual desktops, but I really, really want to be able to link the terminal window I use to test a file I am editing, to the vim window where I am editing said file.

Does anyone know of a window manager that can group windows so that they raise together? Or perhaps something more like: 'when I raise this window also raise these windows.'

Obviously you need a bit more logic to deal with the ordering of windows within a raise group, but this seems like a feature that is completely missing from all current window managers.

Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#76

Post by kijin »

scythe wrote: post #63
andrewstuart wrote: post #58

How come these things never look refined and polished? Always sort of half nice and Unix-clunk.

Personally I think it's the goddamn panel; I've never seen a Linux panel that looks as nice as its counterparts on Windows and OS X. It seems like a small component, but it really "frames" the whole desktop environment -- like a drumbeat -- and in both OS X and Windows there are some complicated gradients in the panel that I'm almost certain were insisted on by some tweed-clad hipster with a title half a sentence lon…

It takes a professional designer (or rather, a dozen of them) to produce a professional-looking desktop theme. Which is exactly what the majority of FOSS projects lack.

When you let a programmer dictate the design, you end up with a lot of features and a lot of misaligned margins. In my experience, many programmers just don't care about pixel-perfect designs. Yes, I'm talking about the same group of people who scoff at typography because "the content is the only thing that matters", blah blah blah. Admittedly, I have no data to back this up, but I have a gut feeling that lightweight desktop environments are particularly teeming with this "function before form" crowd. When you treat design as a second-class citizen of your project, it's no wonder you can't attract good designers to work with you.

On the other hand, when you let a designer dictate the design, you end up with perfectly aligned margins and anti-aliased corners, but all the features and configuration options you care about are hidden behind five clicks and a keyboard shortcut, or worse, removed entirely because they somehow violate the designer's philosophy :(

Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#77

Post by Pxtl »

hyperion2010 wrote: post #75

So I have been using fluxbox for 7 years now and it does nearly everything I need. There is one feature that I have been looking for that I have not seen in any window manager that I know: the ability to group windows so that they raise and lower together. Yes I have virtual desktops, but I really, really want to be able to link the terminal window I use to test a file I am editing, to the vim window where I am editi…

Honestly, I've always wanted a window-manager that mimicked Visual Studio's pin/dock slide-outs. That is, you can dock any task to any edge of the screen, and each edge can be sub-divided into panes. Each pane has multiple tabs, and each pane can be set to auto-hide or can be "pinned" to always-visible, which causes everything else to resize.

It's a rather complicated approach, but I've never found any better multi-tool layout, since it's enormously Fitt's-law-friendly while allowing me to both hide everything or bring in oodles of tool panes quickly and easily as needed.

Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#78

Post by kijin »

ANTSANTS wrote: post #46
WoodenChair wrote: post #35

The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gno…

I think it's worth noting that there's never been a "weird" WM/DE that attracted a sizeable userbase purely on its own merits. Gnome 3 and Unity were to a great extent forced upon their users. If there were real benefits to means of desktop interaction that differed significantly from the established "Windows 95" and "tiling WM" modes, you'd think there'd be a few enthusiasts on the side exploring this realm and tout…

I agree. A desktop environment is one of those things where familiarity trumps innovations. It's like your living room. You might do innovating things in your living room from time to time, but most people would say that the living room itself should remain familiar, conservative, and all around comfortable. You really don't want to re-learn how to sit down in your own couch.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only time when a massive change to the desktop environment is warranted is when there's a massive change to the physical method that people use to interact with computers. The widespread availability of the mouse gave rise to the now-familiar WIMP paradigm. The introduction of multi-touch triggered another round of innovation, but I doubt that this can be backported to keyboard-and-mouse devices any more than Photoshop can be backported to mouseless terminals.

Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#79

Post by timtadh »

m_ram wrote: post #38
Zancarius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would think KDE should disable akonadi and stuff by default personally - its super useable without all the heavy weight "crap". I agree. Unfortunately, they replaced Nepomuk with Baloo in 4.13 (I think ; Baloo seems more aggressive than the former) and have effectively taken the stance that users cannot (easily) disable it [1]. It's somewhat infuriating, because adding your home to the ignore list doesn't appear…

From your first link: "There is no explicit “Enable/Disable” button any more. We would like to promote the use of searching and feel that Baloo should never get in the users way. However, we are smart about it and IF you add your HOME directory to the list of “excluded folders”, Baloo will switch itself off since it no longer has anything to index." This philosophy is why I stopped using GNOME and now prefer Xfce. I'…

Yeah, the developer has a really strange take on indexing. I got into a bit of an argument about it with him on a bug tracker. Baloo had decided that it would index all of my data files which are huge (multiple GB) which was going poorly for it and for me. The system is a wrapper around Xapian (http://xapian.org/) and Sqlite, as with any full text index when you try and put things which are huge into the index it is going to explode the index. Which is what happened to me. It also indexes source code which is fairly useless. (Although to be fair they have (today) blacklisted source code https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/reposito... )

EDIT: looks like 4.13.1 will also have a check box to disable Baloo! https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/reposito... which is great news.

Re: LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

#80

Post by theGimp »

pyre wrote: post #73
theGimp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I've been looking for something like ratpoison for a while, and though the name seems familiar, I had never tried it before. I'm using it now... I think my search is over :) Thank you!

Take a look at StumpWM. IIRC it's done by the author of ratpoison. Bonus: If you're an Emacs user the interface/keyboard shortcuts should make you feel at home (or so I've heard).

I am overjoyed. Thank you :)

I've set a reminder to switch to StumpWM 2 days from now.

Emacs is something I've never tried though Lisp is amazing and that's reason enough to use it.

So many fun toys, so little time...

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