LXQt 1.0.0
github.com
github.com
I do appreciate some of their bundled tools though. PCManFM is a great little file manager, and Featherpad is a much nicer notepad type basic text editor than say KWrite.
That was certainly the last time I used it. I just took another look and it seems like they have improved it a lot. But... I dunno, maybe they had their Digg moment.
This looks exactly like I would like a simple "modern Windows 95" UI to work, which I think is really what most people want.
I also quite like IceWM on Antix for this kind of experience.
It's not perfect but with a few simple tweaks (most of which are scriptable via xfconf-query) they can be fixed. Instead of trying to maintain a desktop across my machines, or over rebuilds, I just run my script and I'm done.
The biggest gripe I have with it is the file choose/save dialog. It's default focus isn't the filename field (like WTF). Let's say you're going to save a file. When the dialog opens and you start to type, it starts to filter files in the current directory. It's totally f*ucking stupid, extremely annoying after the second time you encounter it, and not easy to change in the settings. You need to get under the hood.
That's an odd statement. Sure XFCE may not be as polished or consistent, but most distros will ship a pretty consistent desktop.
Mate on the other hand received plenty of UX work from Red Hat and Canonical back when it was still Gnome 2 and you still have all the themes and styles from that era, to me it doesn't get more 'normal' than that. (OK, they changed the accent color to green and there is apparently no easy way to change that, but I'd say that's the only step back in that regard.)
I got struck hard by this. I was very, very confused when I followed this link, looked at the repo, and saw commits from five years ago.
Inevitably someone finds out about submodules, falls in love, and suggests a megarepo like this. Then, forgetting about them - and never updating.
Unrelated, but I wonder if anyone else feels this. All DEs seem broken/unfinished when the available settings aren't as comprehensive as in Windows or KDE. On Gnome you need gnome-tweak-tool. Without that it just isn't possible to do what feels like very common tasks, which puzzles me. What kind of "playtesting" does the LXQt developers do, how do they get their feedback from users?
"...as comprehensive as in Windows up to Windows 7 (in Classic mode) or KDE."
There, FTFY.
LXQt is the next generation of LXDE, the Lightweight Desktop Environment. It is the product of the merge between Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt.
I was wondering what the relationship between LXQt and LXDE was. Is it just the LXQt project who is claiming this is the next generation, or is that the prevailing consensus among both projects?
I assume the appeal to LXQt isn't so much that it's "lightweight" as that it's "simple". Because, like you said, Plasma is actually very lightweight and snappy, and I'd be willing to bet there are very few places where LXQt will run well and Plasma won't.
Not in my experience, though I have pretty high/less realistic standards coming from i3.
It's plenty usable on modern hardware (anything midrange+ from the past 10 years or so), but it is worth noting that I've still run across folks running core 2 duos in recent times. (Although fwiw they were running plasma, just complaining about it not being very responsive)
If your acquaintances have machines that struggle to run Plasma, I'm honestly surprised they can run graphical apps written in recent GTK or Qt versions at all.
In many cases, Plasma's going to run better/smoother than these "lightweight" window managers and desktops. Because, all the Stockholm Syndrome-ing about "simplicity" often translates to "probably is single threaded and does more CPU work than it should because it's easier." In my experience, they'll tend to have worse vsync issues and tearing.
I doubt i3 is actually drawing shit on the screen faster than Plasma with animations off.
Thankfully I've been able to avoid that for the most part, but I will say it's certainly easier to avoid with plasma's compositor.
>I doubt i3 is actually drawing shit on the screen faster than Plasma with animations off.
I'd definitely be interested in a raw speed comparison if there was a good method/benchmark, but I don't think that has ever been my limitation (although if I were running on lower spec hardware everything counts)
Plasma certainly has more features, but it's still definitely heavier than i3 (or most (all?) tilingWMs), LXQt, icewm, and the like.
On decent hardware there's not a huge point other than preference, but when you've got 2GB of RAM and a 12 year old CPU every bit helps https://i.imgur.com/vZszQFE.png
I could I suppose point a camera or a phone at the screen and measure I suppose.
I'd love to find some good testing on it somewhere, but I do recall off the top of my head that Windows XP or Windows Vista/7 (with Areo disabled) had significantly lower latency than the GPU accelerated counterparts in Vista+. I believe it has to do a lot with Vsync, but imagine there's some additional overhead involved as well.
Of course many would say removing screen tearing is a valid tradeoff there, I mostly agree but not everything is significantly effected by tearing either.
There seem to be a fair few smaller (in community) DE projects (LXQt, XFCE, Cinnamon, Budgie, more I don't immediately recall) who are keen for Wayland support in principal but don't want to be landed with writing/maintaining their own display server.
I know there are libs like wlroots, libweston, mir, but in practice it still seems to be too much to bite off to write a display server with one of these.
Is there appetite in the Linux desktop dev community for a grab-and-go toolkit-agnostic Wayland display server that allowed DEs to plug in their own independent WM, decorations, animations, shell? In theory shell is doable already by xdg-shell, but splitting WM and decorations out would be a new approach for Wayland. Is this technically feasible? I have the urge to start writing one myself but I'm not experienced in this area and it would be interesting for myself but almost certainly subpar for purpose.
Am I just describing Wayfire?
Without commenting on tech differences (I'm loving my mixed dpi wayland setup..), the social/community impact of X11 allowing UI/UX people to have their projects separate to the display server seems to have been significant.
Well, yes. It's called X11.
The thread did mention PaperDE [1] however , which you might want to look at if you're interested in a lightweight Wayland + QT environment.
[0] https://github.com/lxqt/lxqt/issues/10 [1] https://gitlab.com/cubocore/paper/paperde
I feel we're currently missing a minimalist stacking Wayland compositor in the vein of something like openbox.
Also, I'm not very educated in this matter, but isn't wlroots a fairly good Wayland compositor? Considering sway is built on it and supports both tiling and stacking, I think that might be worth a look.
It still might be a good choice for LXQt if they do plan on supporting Wayland, though.
But that's on X11 then, right?
I wonder if there's a stand-out feature that signifies this release transition?
I was recently looking into lightweight pocket linux setup, and considered desktop alternatives, zeroing in on Xfce or LXDE. Will give LXQt another chance.
Fed up, I decided to give Ubuntu a try and what a surprise. Not only was it a bit snappier than Lubuntu.
What made the difference, was that Ubuntu had a much, much better quality of life features that made using it much more productive.
I wish I were competent enough to create a distro that's both lightweight and has essential features for sane, easy to use functionality. Alas, I'm not.
So my opinions might be a tad outdated as I haven't really fiddled with my UI that much in the last couple of years (except to switch back and forth between Wayland and X11, and nouveau and proprietary NVIDIA drivers for my main personal laptop).
But I haven't participated in a good, old, Linux desktop holy war and rant in a long time, so here we go. :)
GNOME definitely seems to be ahead of the competition (including KDE/Plasma) when it comes to basic, "just works", kinds of things. This includes better (hot-plugging) screen management in the common cases and the on-screen keyboard seems to work better/consistently than KDE's. I can't think of more off the top of my head, but I remember thinking there were more things that worked better- maybe audio/volume settings and network settings?
I'm even one of those weirdos who enjoys the GNOME Shell workflow/UX, though when I say "GNOME", I'm mostly referring to the whole suite of desktop libraries/utilities/etc. So Budgie and GNOME Classic/Fallback also "count" as GNOME desktops to me.
In any case, I do still have several gripes with the GNOME desktop(s):
1. Network Manager still seems to be unaware of wireguard. I hate that I have to manage this from the command line.
2. GDM's login screen doesn't share settings such as touchpad-tap-to-click with the regular desktop. Now, I understand that Linux is a multi-user system and that tap-to-click is configured on a per-user basis, but I feel like there should be (easily discoverable) global default settings.
3. GNOME Shell still feels a little slow and janky at times on my "old" personal laptop (2012, but has a Core i7 and 16GB of RAM). That seems to be the case for all combinations of Wayland/X11 + nouveau/NVIDIA, but I'll admit that nouveau is noticeably worse. It could be that it's an NVIDIA thing.
4. GNOME Shell's app drawer UX still sucks. I don't know what the answer is, and I agree with them that a nested menu that groups things by optional/convention-based metadata on .desktop files isn't a good option, but they still haven't found an answer that works for me. I guess I'm glad that we can at least manage and group things in recent versions, but that's too tedious for me, too. And the icons are still way too big.
5. [GNOME Shell] I thought the distinction between window-menu and app-menu was actually a good idea, but you just can't pull it off when you don't own the whole stack, which is a shame. So, I understand why they abandoned it. But, now that they did, the top bar is even more useless than it was in the earlier days.
If you end in the same boat, probably Xfce is the closest. I ended up back on Gnome(with many customizations).
The only problem is that the version included in RPi OS is terribly old, and I haven't found a convenient way of getting the bleeding edge version onto it.
https://resources.qt.io/videos/programming-for-smart-devices...
I think that's there's a huge problem with Qt's installer where I've seen a lot of people blindly checking all the boxes and installing things they'll never need like 6 different windows ABIs, the android version and whatnot which will install literally gigabytes of stuff and lead to a bloated perception (I teach students to make UIs with Qt every year and every year even if I warn them beforehand, they used to still fall into that trap... nowadays I just tell them to use aqt which will just install exactly what is needed).
A build of Qt on desktop machines for the needs of LXQT (basically, QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets) can be in the ~15-20 megabytes ballpark.
I've used Qt in the past and current. Qt is big and, while it might be sufficiently architected, I wouldn't describe it as well architected. There's a lot of Qt-isms that don't follow modern C++ paradigms. The concept of shallow- and deep- copy is particularly frustrating, everything that's based in QObject can't be moved, and a lot of the objects simply _aren't_ extensible enough. Qt's QNetworkAccessManager is probably one of the least-acceptable (or extensible) network access libraries; good luck adding support for custom types of proxies or schemes.
What I mean by well architected is that:
1 it respects the user choice so it tries to use the user themes, icons , fonts (it would do a even better job if Miscrosoft and Apple would contribute a bit when they change their designs)
2 it is efficient, it does not use some hacky stuff like you see in angular or react, where one click causes some data to change then a lot of code runs and check what changed where, then try see what other data needs to change then finally updates the DOM, which DOM is a super complex piece of software that is super easy to eat a lot of CPU with just a line of CSS or cause a lot of recalculations when you update one item.
3 Qt gives you a lot of widgets to build on top of, I remember it had a lot of APIs not only for GUI but also networking, desktop integration(like to use the native notifications)
4 I loved the fact Qt had it's own standard library, I know some c++ purists won't like that and the qmake , but we need to understand how many platforms Qt targeted and that the col new C++ features were not there on all this platforms when Qt4 was created (and even with Qt4 I think there was a way to upgrade from Qt3 so there was not a complete start from scratch).
I assume there are some smaller toolkits, there are some posted here but I think the smaller ones have only 20% of the features.
IMO the reason Qt is not used as much is because it uses C++ , for modern application I think developers prefer garbage collected languages and Qt (last time I checked) did not had mature bindings for this popular languages.
Sorry for the long comment, what would you use today if you need to make an application for someone, something simple like some buttons, menus and it does a bit of work maybe with some files or the internet), the goal is to be fast and have very few bugs that you will have to support by fixing them.
Indeed so! Qt is living today with the fact that it was built and designed long before C++11 was really a thing (where C++11 is the baseline of modern C++ and I would argue that even C++17 should be considered the baseline). The design decisions of Qt are directly against modern C++ design. I think that's ultimately the core of the problem: that modern Qt is orthogonal, not complementary, to modern C++.
Range-for loop? Oops, accidentally detached and deep-copied into a temporary.
Move objects? Just, no.
unique_ptr? Nah, QScopedPointer. Also still not moveable. make_unique? Nah, reset(new...) and ignore the modern advice that you shouldn't use `new`
Qt still takes naked pointers and decides willy-nilly whether to take ownership. It still has examples everywhere for using naked new without even mentioning the context of a smart pointer. It has the concept of "you used new, but the parent actually owns it, unless the parent is null" which is just a time bomb for anyone new to the framework let alone the language.
No, there's no way I would recommend Qt to someone who isn't experienced. Since I wouldn't recommend it then it's no wonder to me why Qt isn't used so much. It has little to do with C++ and a lot more to do with the design decisions of Qt itself.
> IMO the reason Qt is not used as much is because it uses C++
Arguably. Also arguably is because Qt brings along a lot of unnecessary baggage. You mentioned using Qt requires using qmake (which definitely counts as arcane, if not archaic); cmake does a pretty good job of wrapping qmake but doesn't eliminate it. And all of that is because of Qt's non-standard magical signals & slots system which is really just a more error-prone semi-async system when compared to any other eventing system.
Using Qt efficiently strongly needs Qt Creator which isn't nearly as good as Visual Studio or VS Code and not as feature-rich as CLion or other intellij-based IDEs I've used -- but at least it performans way better than CLion or intellij trash.
Qt's license changing in 5.15 has also become a significant penalty to non-commercial use. This fact alone means there's no way I'd use Qt in a new project, even a commercial one.
Modern Qt developers also have to become javascript developers since Qt's UI is heavily driving towards QML. That's an unfortunate direction and also inhibits adoption of Qt IMO. Why write an application in C++ if you need to learn javascript anyway? There are better feature-rich javascript frameworks with better community adoption and better price points.
> what would you use today if you need to make an application for someone, something simple like some buttons, menus and it does a bit of work maybe with some files or the internet), the goal is to be fast and have very few bugs that you will have to support by fixing them
For GUI, Dear Imgui [0].
For network, Asio [1].
For files, plain standard streams. They're not fast but if your files are your bottleneck then I'd consider memory-mapped files.
[0]: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
[1]: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_77_0/doc/html/boost_asio/re...
I disagree; it's very possible to write a small application very quickly in modern C++ without Qt.
> with Qt you have more then a GUI, you don't have to Google what library I need to do some networking
If you are new to Qt then you do need to google how to use Qt.
On the flip side, if you're not new to whatever other library you want to use for networking then you don't need to google to use that. Indeed, I don't need to use Google to figure out how to use asio and beast to connect to a server and download data using http.
> or what is the win32 API to count how many screens this PC has
What small application needs to know how many screens this PC has? I definitely don't consider that a small application and I would need to go "Google" how to get that information out of Qt.
I would just as quickly find that information from Xlib because fuck Windows.
> for a quick project I don't want to learn some niche libraries
For a quick project I don't want to use Qt. Your argument is merely an opinion.
Still, I find it debatable whether modern C++ is so much better than Qt. Qt design principles might lead to less performance but I, for one, find the design consistent and solid.
The main advantage of Qt over modern C++ though is its stability. If you had written a Qt app 20 years ago it would still compile and work as intended, whereas C++ become a different language every 5 years.
I share your sentiment about QML though, and hope they will quickly reinvest into Qwidgets.
Yes
> main advantage of Qt over modern C++ though is its stability. If you had written a Qt app 20 years ago it would still compile and work as intended, whereas C++ become a different language every 5 years.
Your arguments contradict eachother.
C++ only becomes another language every 5 years if you want to use the new features. The new features make things simpler and safer.
I say I do want to use the new features; I want the safety improvements and the simplicity offered. Qt makes it practically impossible to do.
> Also arguably is because Qt brings along a lot of unnecessary baggage. You mentioned using Qt requires using qmake (which definitely counts as arcane, if not archaic); cmake does a pretty good job of wrapping qmake but doesn't eliminate it.
CMake does not invoke qmake for Qt projects. It does invoke moc though. Perhaps you meant that you need to use moc? That's mostly true, though verdigris does work and only requires a modern C++ compiler.
> And all of that is because of Qt's non-standard magical signals & slots system which is really just a more error-prone semi-async system when compared to any other eventing system.
Signal-slot is simply a convenient way to declare events (signals) and connect callbacks (slots) to them, using implicit per-thread event queues. Pretty standard stuff.
> Modern Qt developers also have to become javascript developers since Qt's UI is heavily driving towards QML.
This is simply false. Qt contains two separate UI systems for two very different use cases. Qt Widgets does not use QML (or JS) and is your classic CPU-rendered desktop toolkit. Qt Quick is a declarative UI framework designed for layer-based GPU compositing, mainly aimed at mobile, embedded and "graphically rich" interfaces.
You can write Qt applications for years and years and not even know how JS is spelled.
> For GUI, Dear Imgui [0].
Imgui is a nice library, but it lacks a very large number of features you'd want in a desktop application, all of which you'd have to write yourself. Some of which you'll have a hard time developing (e.g. accessibility). This is of course because Imgui isn't meant to be a general-purpose GUI library for desktop applications.
> For files, plain standard streams.
It's kinda funny that you complain so much and then recommend iostreams of all things.
Indeed
> Signal-slot is simply a convenient way to declare events (signals) and connect callbacks (slots) to them, using implicit per-thread event queues. Pretty standard stuff.
They're not convenient because they're not standard and require ~~qmake~~moc. A regular function with a regular event loop is convenient. But Qt doesn't let you poke around its event loop without using signals and slots.
> Imgui is a nice library, but it lacks a very large number of features you'd want in a desktop application, all of which you'd have to write yourself.
Maybe in a full desktop application but remember the idea is for a small one.
> Some of which you'll have a hard time developing (e.g. accessibility).
A small free application doesn't need accessibility to be useful to the author.
> This is of course because Imgui isn't meant to be a general-purpose GUI library for desktop applications.*
If you say so.
> It's kinda funny that you complain so much and then recommend iostreams of all things.
iostreams are just as easy as qt and without the bloat needed for it.
Like I said, you don't have to use moc, there are alternatives. Also, Qt has supported "regular functions" for many years, since you can use connect() with function pointers, PTMFs, lambdas etc.
The only difference between a "regular function" and a slot: method is that the latter has some extra RTTI data which allows it to be safely called from dynamic bindings. Another use-case is old-style (Qt 4) connect where you pass the slot name as a string and connect() has to look-up the method pointer at runtime (and also checks parameter types etc.). That's a rare sight, though.
> iostreams are just as easy as qt and without the bloat needed for it.
iostreams is an atrocious API and bloaty on top. Easily the worst library in the C++ standard (in no small part due to its sheer age, being one of the oldest parts of the language).
Usualy QObject based classes are needed to get the GUI working.
I ship ~20MB of Qt DLLs with my desktop application.
QT used to support more minimal builds i thought i.e. without some WebKit extensions and such but yes full fat QT is a bit on the bloaty side :)
Hefty when compared to what? In a world of webview-based apps, Qt is extraordinarily lean.
No doubt Qt has them both beat on convenience and features, but still, there are lighter toolkits out there.