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Comment by fredmorcos | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

Collaboration like this is really great.

I hope the KDE guys never go bonkers like the Gnome/RedHat guys and keep up the nice modularity they have achieved by now so other DEs can reuse some of their functionality.

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

As a former Qt (and KDE) developer, I can very much understand wanting to develop with the language and framework you're intimately familiar with. At least at the time (~2010), C++ with Qt was light years ahead of C with GTK.

Absolutely, but you'd be a nice guy if you factor out the essential and common parts into C libraries, so that others can make use of it as well (from any language and framework) which increases collaboration and decreases fragmentation.

Some might see the need for C libraries as evil and unnecessary (I personally don't), but it's the situation we're in.

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