Lumina Desktop Environment | Hacker News Reader

Lumina Desktop Environment

lumina-desktop.org

111 pointspabs356 comments

As a user who tried a few of sub-popular DEs in recent decades, I see zero information on why would/should one choose it. ¿Does it have: snap/zones/keybindings for windows, mount features, configurable menu, hw acceleration, exposé, notifications, language menu, etc, etc? It’s not that it must support these (other programs/settings may do that), but their landing sells on completely irrelevant points, if you plan to install and use some software instead of playing with wallpapers all day.

I don’t mean to sound harsh or too negative, but it just doesn’t add up to something meaningful or specific. You can only try and find out by yourself, after reading docs on its config files/utils.

What problems does it solve?

>What problems does it solve?

It was designed as a DE for PcBSD. Unlike Linux distros, some OS design teams do believe that having only one tool do a job and that tool should be perfectly integrated with the rest of the OS has some value.

This sentence must be an intro on that site. It makes it very clear what to expect and all the whys.

The Lumina Desktop was started in 2012 by Ken Moore. He started working on it in his free time. He wanted to design a small lightweight desktop for PC-BSD that didn’t come with the challenge of dealing with Linux-isms. However instead of designing a desktop that had BSD-isms, he decided to design the desktop to be as OS agnostic as possible with as few dependecies as possible ...

It is there in the front page, along with a link to its history - https://lumina-desktop.org/post/2021-07-01/

The reasons that they highlight seem like they are correctly aimed at the people who could want to use it. This is the highlighted features:

- Lightweight Desktop Environment

- Intuitive Layout

- Completely Customizable

- Freely Available

- Portable

If you don't care about any of those things then yeah, Lumina is not for you.

The "features" page also features even more features that potential users could care about: https://lumina-desktop.org/features/

But again, if nothing there pique your interest, then Lumina is not for you and you're looking for Gnome, KDE or something else similar to those.

Exactly. This is why I use the Moksha Desktop.

> Moksha Desktop

Hadn't heard of this one, so looked it up, and all I can say is... Not again. GNOME, KDE, Enlightenment - is it the fate of every DE to make a release so bad that a chunk of the users fork an old version and run with it?

This "old version" is alive and well and has been since many many years. It is my daily driver on my laptop and my desktop. It is extremely lightweight, snappy and beautiful.

There is talk of switching to a newer version of Enlightenment since it is getting more stable again.

> This is the highlighted features:

Doesn't this sort of prove the point of the one you're replying to? Yeah sure I care about these things, but it tells me almost nothing because I could categorize a lot of other DE with those words as well. I want to know what it is like for everyday usage. How does it manage windows would be the first thing which I'd like to see some footage or explanation of.

> I see zero information on why would/should one choose it

It says right from the start that it doesn't use any of the Linux desktop stack software.

It's for the BSD operating systems. Is there anything else competing in this space?

Yes and No ... they specifically say that while it was originally planned for PC-BSD, it was ultimately made OS agnostic:

... He started working on it in his free time. He wanted to design a small lightweight desktop for PC-BSD that didn’t come with the challenge of dealing with Linux-isms. However instead of designing a desktop that had BSD-isms, he decided to design the desktop to be as OS agnostic as possible with as few dependecies as possible ...

That doesn’t really answer the question. What are these linuxisms, and why are they problems? Are they actually technical problems, or is this mere license purity?

New desktop from the bsd universe. Available for Linux. No dependencies. Qt5 Based. Customisable. X11. Free of systemd. Multimonitor. Plaintext Config. Can reproduce the look of other desktop systems. Plug-ins. Widgets. Nothing about multi desktop.

Screenshots?

Found hidden inside hamburger menu: https://lumina-desktop.org/screenshots/

Nice wallpapers but would be way more helpful if they actually opened some windows for the screenshots.

Yeah. Found more application level screenshots at this page: https://lumina-desktop.org/features/

Even then there's not much there to get me interested.

Ironic since one of the desktop features listed is "Create/Edit Screenshots"

Use the desktop site if you don't see the left menu: https://lumina-desktop.org/screenshots/

Thank you. Also,

- BSD 3-Clause license

- mostly C++ (Qt has other bindings too)

- no dependency on DBUS, policykit or consolekit

- no Wayland on the roadmap for now (but they are open to porting in the future)

- screenshots here: https://lumina-desktop.org/screenshots/

- github here: https://github.com/lumina-desktop/lumina

> No dependencies.

> Qt5 Based.

We have very different definitions of "dependencies".

if you're going to write a desktop environment with widgets, buttons, list views, GL abstraction, file system explorers, image viewers, etc... you're going to reimplement pretty much the whole of Qt Core / Gui / Widgets anyways

> if you're going to write a desktop environment with widgets, buttons, list views, GL abstraction, file system explorers, image viewers, etc... you're going to reimplement pretty much the whole of Qt Core / Gui / Widgets anyways

Is this not the same basic rationalization process anyone goes through when introducing third-party dependencies to a project?

You either:

1. don't include the functionality

2. implement it yourself

3. depend on something else to do it for you

but when we are talking about open-source the only practical difference between 2. and 3. is the git repo in which the files are. There's no difference between depending on myself from yesterday writing pushbutton.cpp and depending someone else writing the same code 15 years ago, those are different persons than myself writing image_editor_ui.cpp today in both cases.

I don't see what this has to do with whether Lumina has dependencies or not, it obviously does.

The rationalization process is completely orthogonal. I'm not here to debate the value of dependencies which you seem to be interested in defending.

I think your issue is maybe you are not the type of person that evaluates DE. All DEs I am aware of use a toolkit , mostly you have 2 camps GTK and Qt. Linux(probably BSD too) don't have a built-in GUI framework into the kernel and X11 is very basic so a GUI tooklit is needed.

Probably if the devs will add the text "a Qt based DE" would satisfy your nitpick.

Thank you. This is the kind of information that should have been upfront and immediately findable when accessing the link or as a submission statement. Very appreciated.

I don't understand why anyone would want widgets. They have NEVER been a good experience, from system load standpoint or UX. They bring nothing interesting to the table.

Just use i3 or DWM if you want minimal and lightweight with minimal putzing around with window placement

As a recent convert to minimal dynamic partitioning window managers I do miss the Z axis to multiple desktops that widgets provided. As well as my home-grown widgets, lovingly coded.

These days, I am really impressed by the MATE desktop environment:

https://mate-desktop.org/

It does the stuff that you need without excess weight, the look and feel is flexible enough that you can make it look like other systems if you prefer, and the small development team consistently put out new releases to fix and refine it without any drama.

AWS use it for their Linux cloud-based desktop service, probably for these reasons.

Ubuntu MATE is a great showcase for what can be done with MATE. It's arguably more user-friendly than the main Ubuntu, with the MATE desktop and quick-start features like a well-curated software selector.

https://ubuntu-mate.org/

MATE is fantastic, I've been running it for the last few years. The central feature is that it gives you a desktop with familiar features and idioms; it doesn't try to "reimagine the experience" or reorganize all the functionality or any of the other stuff that drives me crazy about e.g. Gnome 3. It's the DE for people who want to spend as little time as possible thinking about a DE.

I found tiling was better for "not thinking about my DE"

In which I never think about Tue size or placement of my windows. Its mostly automatic and I can swap them between spots with one click. Where with gnome and mate, if I want two windows next to each other I have to putz around d with dragging them to the right snap points

You can run i3 with MATE, see https://mattgreer.dev/blog/mate-and-i3/

Interesting, thank you!

I like MATE, but it (and most other DEs) doesn't have HiDPI support. So, back to Gnome.

I use MATE with HiDPI on my XPS 15 and a 4k Dell monitor.

Look at the MATE Tweaks tool and you'll find the option.

I've found cinnamon has the best HiDPI support, especially when you need different fractional scaling factors for multiple monitors and can't use a Wayland-based DE because of your GPU drivers (looking at you, NVidia)

MATE definitely supports HiDPI, although I don't think it tries very hard to auto-detect it. (But I'm running a 1440p monitor. 4k might be better.)

With how much of a trainwreck GTK4/GNOME 40 was, I cannot blame you. I'm still writing my apps in GTK 3.38, and I probably won't update my apps until they get their Adwaita garbage ironed out. Breaking compatibility with stylesheets is a regression, and I refuse to yield to this "just embrace binary themes and maybe (like icons in the filepicker) we'll impliment it later!" mentality. Thankfully I don't have to, and there's a great community of people who are still perfectly contented to stay on 3.38.

The trouble I have with the Mate desktop these days is that most of the GTK applications out there are moving or have moved to GTK 3, and generally take 'advantage' of various GTK3-isms in their user interface. So you're going along using the app and them you hit some button and are confronted with a UI element that looks completely out of place, and often isn't styled properly.

So I gave up on it and switched to KDE. It's not as beautiful as Gnome 2 was (IMHO), but it's not bad, and it's still a platform that people write apps for. (To the extent that any Linux-based platform is a platform that people write apps for.)

A suggestion, please do not hide important stuff inside hamburger menu.

A suggestion, as a mobile user, maybe you are not the target audience for this site.

What a silly thing to say. Just because I am looking at this on my phone right now doesn’t mean that I don’t also have desktop computers.

Haha, what are you even trying to say here? That mobile users don’t or can’t use Linux as their desktop environment?

I kept trying lightweight DEs like this over and over again (XFCE, LXDE, MATE, etc.) - I wanted them to work because I'd rather not give the desktop any more CPU resources than necessary. Time and time again there were a handful of things that I realized I'd taken for granted with the more heavy desktops (Gnome, KDE, etc.) that brought me back.

In the end I realized what I wanted was something that got out of my way and let me drive with a keyboard (and yes, was full of all the features I'd expect without needing to tweak and script). I've landed with PopOS using their tiling WM system, and I haven't looked back.

I wonder what the future holds now that Project Trident (Void-based Linux distro that came with Lumina as a default DE) has reached its end.

I settled down with vanilla xfce a long time ago. I don't customize almost anything (except keyboard layout), because i think having a simple standard setup is valuable on its own.

There is too many things to do, beyond how window decorations look and what wallpaper i am using...

And it's easy to script up all your settings/tweaks to move to new machines or survive re-installs

Does it support HiDPI displays? Lack of good HiDPI support was the reason why I switched from Xfce to i3 + custom Qt/GTK+ configs.

I like lightweight DE's. I would like to see a side by side with other lightweight DE's for look and feel and resource consumption. This looks good though.

The first claim on the page: “Lumina is designed to have a small footprint, giving your system the best performance possible.”

I suspect that the setup I’ve been using for a decade, with no desktop environment and dwm, leads to better performance.

As well as being less annoying: the first screenshot shows a pop-up, hierarchical menu, an interface element that I detest. That’s not the way I want to change settings.

Seems rather essential, which is a good thing. Also good that it is ported to Alpine Linux. But although they say it is packaged for Debian, I couldn't find its .deb anywhere.

Ugly in the spirit of win 10. No windows decorations (title bar, borders) . No consistent decoration on windows that they show. Buttons too small. I mean even TWM does it better.

I guess, this can be easily changed and they were deliberately aiming at a minimalistic appearance for these screenshots:

> "Appearance profiles can easily be used to reproduce the look and feel of other common desktop systems."

https://lumina-desktop.org/features/

Yeah, right… What was that Linux Distel trying to copy maxOS again? „Elementary“? All rounded rectangles and the same 50 shades of gray, but not a single label had the same margins to its button.

Design takes more than a „skin“. Besides proportions and font rendering, it’s also about behaviour.

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