LXQt 0.11 Released

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 clusterfuck KDE has become... but those are just details.

I feel like the Linux desktop is dead, and one of the worst examples of open source software right now.

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.

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. The worst part is that, with more effort spent on cross-desktop specs and evangelism, software written "for" one desktop would work far better on others. But the XDG (cross desktop group) is in a pathetic state right now, with nobody reading the mailing list and no specs ever being worked on. Nobody cares, because very few people have enough context to see the need for it all.

Not to mention the sad state of UI toolkits right now. This isn't about GTK vs. Qt or anything... but you can't pick up your favourite language (Python, JS, whatever) and easily write cross-platform apps that work well on Linux. So what does everybody do? They ship a god damn copy of Chromium in their app. Bloody electron apps that, of course, respect zero accessibility settings, platform integration out of the window etc. Because that is the easiest thing to do.

It's pissing me off. Most people who care about their desktop have migrated or are migrating to OSX and the whole thing snowballs.

TLDR: No collaboration across desktops. Fragmentation with no cross desktop compatibility. 2016 was the year the Linux desktop died - won't anybody revive it?

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 some design patterns from the classic desktop ("classic" taskbar or global menu, icon-based desktop grid, etc) without trying to reinvent "desktop shells".

Working on the desktop doesn't always mean using ancient tech, nor solving ancient problems - FWIW I'm probably younger than the average HN demographic. We tried having/creating solid developer tooling, good documentation, a decent-looking website but there's only so much you can do when you're lacking manpower in every area. Nearly all my time was spent doing developer outreach.

I share your love for UX and UI development. For what it's worth, the LXQt project could really use people like you dedicating a few hours now and then on drafting app designs, filing UX issues, etc. If you're ever interested, file an issue on the tracker[0] and cc me (@jleclanche) on it.

https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues

I'm not sure where they stand wrt XDG, but I bet if you asked them for help with UX and designing stuff, they would love to collaborate.

[0] https://elementary.io

On LXQt, I made sure there was no NIH. All the apps that came out of LXQt were lightweight alternatives to bloated stuff from KDE and were "in scope" of the desktop environment. Whereas Elementary includes an Email client.

To put things in context: An email client is office software. It's such a burden to maintain that Mozilla dropped support for theirs (Thunderbird), despite its massive userbase.

People work on what they want to work I suppose, but we're talking about apps that are never going to be used outside of that one particular desktop. That one desktop out of god knows how many, since everybody is working on their own piece.

Are there really so many different ways to do a lightweight tabbed text editor with syntax highlighting in GTK, that Scratch, gedit and Leafpad all need to exist? Or can we admit there's a problem?