LXQt 2.0.0 | Hacker News Reader

LXQt 2.0.0

lxqt-project.org

210 pointsjrepinc56 comments

This is really an amazing and underappreciated desktop environment.

If you're looking to save some RAM, this ain't it. Not because LXQt is memory hungry, but because Plasma is so damn efficient these days.

I use Plasma but I can really recommend the LXQt file manager PCManFM-Qt (catchy name ha?). It's a really snappy and no nonsense file manager that feels right at home in Plasma. I prefer it over Dolphin.

> PCManFM-Qt (catchy name ha?)

I believe PCMan was the original developer, and FM for "file manager" made sense. Then it was ported to Qt, so add -qt?

That's kind of a mess, isn't it?

Still, it makes a bit more sense than "Dolphin" or "Nemo", and you'll probably never actually see these names if the desktop file is configured to show a generic name for your desktop environment.

"Dolphin" and "Nemo" are more memorable, and they don't need to make sense: what does the Amazon rainforest have to do with online shopping? Nothing at all. But it's a catchy name and the company is very successful.

In KDE, if you navigate through the K-menu to Applications->System, you'll see "Dolphin", and in smaller text underneath, "File Manager" so you know what it is.

Wait for the release for VR

Worlds within worlds.....

> If you're looking to save some RAM, this ain't it. Not because LXQt is memory hungry, but because Plasma is so damn efficient these days.

Not according to these benchmarks:

https://itvision.altervista.org/linux-desktop-environments-s...

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/07/12/desktop-environmen...

Typically on lower end machines I disable Akonadi (the PIM data storage service) and Baloo (file indexer). Some systems don't enable them by default.

I'd be interested to know how much of an effect that has.

yeah, baloo would crash anyway lol, as it always does.

Unfortunately for me it does not crash. I have to kill this monster myself.

> If you're looking to save some RAM, this ain't it. Not because LXQt is memory hungry, but because Plasma is so damn efficient these days.

I doubt it. Have you got any benchmarks?

Can confirm. A fresh boot of plasma eats up around 666MB of RAM. Not much more than the so called lightweight distros, sometimes even less than them, and plasma is a full on DE not a gimped WM.

For benchmarks, just Google them yourself or spin up a VM yourself.

> around 666MB of RAM

A decade ago, that was a lot of RAM for a desktop environment. In the late '00s, I remember Ubuntu with Gnome 2 using around ~128 MB of RAM right after boot.

What happened? Most DEs aren't that much more complicated than they were a decade+ ago. Is it the array of supporting libraries (Qt and Gtk) that get loaded into memory? I could see that being a problem since even the "lightweight" DEs like XFCE and LXQt rely on them heavily.

I haven't checked but I bet a significant part of that is just increased image sizes. Icons and everything are going to be uncompressed in memory and if they're now 256x256 where they used to be 32x32 or whatever, it probably adds up.

There's probably also things like unicode data (ICU is like 20MB), more daemons (WiFi, rendezvous, Bluetooth, etc.), and I think C compilers have generally optimised for speed at the cost of code size over time.

Let's not forget that nowadays each pointers takes 8 bytes (64 bits) instead of 4 bytes like it was the case on 32 bits systems most of us grew up using, and often have the numbers for in mind. Executables are bigger because of that, and so are their stack and heap (probably not twice as big but probably not too far from that!).

Every pixmap is in much higher resolution nowadays, fonts have much more characters, more buffers are used, people use caching and precomputation more because it makes the apps snappier, etc.

XFCE's resource consumption went up significantly after it got ported from GTK2 to GTK3, the same thing also happened with MATE.

Around 2012 XFCE would use around 448MB. That's more than a decade ago.

I dunno, my Plasma 5 desktop is lightyears more functional than any DE I was running a decade ago - though I do agree with sibling comments that the RAM delta is probably more to do with pixmaps and pointer sizes that code bloat.

There is also the case to be made that RAM is made to be used, and that half a gigabyte is a perfectly reasonable amount to allocate to a snappy desktop in a world where even the lamest new computer has at least 8.

Sure, I agree that 600+ MB of RAM use is not a big problem for most people, but the context here is in the comment I was responding to, which pointed out that it's not much more than the "lightweight" DEs, so you might as well just use Plasma.

My point is that that's a recent-ish change, the lightweight DEs used to use less than 150 MB of RAM, and it's rather surprising how much the gap has closed. I don't know any truly lightweight DEs; to get small you have to use a tiling WM like i3 or sway.

> A fresh boot of plasma eats up around 666MB of RAM. Not much more than the so called lightweight distros,

I used Xfce for well over a decade; maybe closer to two. It has long been one of the so-called lightweight environments, and it deserved that reputation when I started with it, but its memory footprint has grown significantly over the years. I don't think it makes a good benchmark for "lightweight" any more.

I'm on Plasma now. It has definitely improved in this department over the same period of time, but it's not what I would consider light. More like middleweight. To be fair, it also seems to be doing more than old Xfce did, with things like QtWebEngine presumably offering GUI functionality of some kind. (Akonadi was another memory eater when I last did a default install, though I think that one is easier to avoid these days.) If wonder if LXQt shuns components like that, or loads them only when needed.

I don't think a fresh boot is the best benchmark for this. I do use plasma and in my experience memory usage tends to go quite a bit higher with use, even if you close everything. I don't think they have leaks and it's probably just memory some data structures and the allocator hold onto for various reasons.

I'm finding that Plasma 6 on Arch is using almost twice the VRAM as Gnome 46.

> For benchmarks, just Google them yourself

I've done that already. None of the ones I've seen show that Plasma is anywhere near on par with LXQt.

Plasma generally scores in the best quartile in Phoronix benches.

> I doubt it. Have you got any benchmarks?

Here is my set on Ubuntu 22.04:

https://www.theregister.com/Print/2022/08/18/ubuntu_remixes/

And from 2013:

https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/04/26/xbuntu_round_up...

KDE is not lightweight, but v5 is not as bad as older releases were compared to the contemporary competition.

he sayin the truth but de is not about memory only, its about cpu disk usage and all the apps that comes with it, plasma on lar with lxqt but still lxqt won on all other resources

Eh. If you want to save RAM & CPU, i3 is where it's at.

xmonad

I used LXQT for a week or so as a daily driver while I was picking envs (eventually landing on i3), and I found LXQT to be buggy and lacking. That was, oh maybe 3 years ago though. So assuming steady development, I hope it’s gotten better.

It’s also maybe not fair that this was on a dell laptop that didn’t play particularly nicely with Linux.

Plasma is not efficient, it still uses ton of memory and leaks memory like crazy. Last time I've tried to use it, which was last year I think, plasma-desktop and kwin processes alone used 1.5GB after full day of work.

I switched to LXQt because it's power management, e.g. suspend the laptop if the battery goes below whatever percent, actually worked whereas KDE's wasn't and such a basic feature breaking (and causing me to lose work) made me too mad to debug it. I'm sure it's fixed now, but that was only the final straw for me. KDE tries to be too fancy and ends up buggy, whereas LXQt is simple and just werks.

If you like LXQt but would prefer lower RAM usage, then consider LXDE. Even with NetworkManager and PulseAudio, mine only uses 300MB.

Unmaintained since 2021. The program is the same man, and he moved on to LXQt.

* programMER

Sorry. Dr Hong Jen "PCMan" Yee.

so misleading, please stop saying things like this, plasma efficient at ram bla bla bla. but plasma eat resources, CPU hogging it even eat cpu for moving a pointer, and the index system sucks

I use MATE, but I prefer PcManFM-Qt over Caja most of the time. It is really good.

With software bloat being rampant, this is a medicine.

Qt keeps the overhead down enormously compared to GTK-based, or even (but to a lesser extend) KDE-based (which itself is Qt-based).

With good Wayland support.

I think this is replacing XFCE as goto low resource desktop on Linux.

I have my grandparents using lxqt (on Debian). I use sway myself, but I knew they needed something familiar to their Windows XP-era customs and without any frills.

The only tech issue I had to debug for them in the last year was when one of the housekeepers pulled a wire while cleaning.

Before Debian LXQt, they were using Lubuntu 18.04 (which was still on LXDE at the time).

Don't overlook https://github.com/lxqt/qterminal no matter your distro: I used it on Ubuntu because it was the closest I had found (thus far) to iTerm2 on Linux. I still have the lust to teach it about https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode

I'd also recommend https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/index.html . I switched to it from iTerm2 for the reasons in https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm#iterm... (primarily a simpler Lua config to reason about and version control)

The default kgx/kings-cross terminal on my PinePhone (Manjaro Phosh) is terribly sluggish, and sits at a few dozen % CPU while idle. I tried Foot, as a faster, Wayland-native alternative; but that hit some weird rendering behaviour when I added ANSI escapes to my prompt.

I tried qterminal and it's responsive, doesn't eat resources when idle, handles all the weird escapes I've thrown at it, and also has decent quality-of-life features like right-click menus, etc. Highly recommended!

Qt could be much larger if the licensing terms were not 5d chess for over a decade.

Unfortunately, Qt's only interest seems to lay in the squeezing of their old existing customers, an ever-dwindling customer base as embedded socs capable of running web browsers become cheaper and more accessible. They _still_ don't seem to be taking the threat of web technologies seriously; Where web tech can now run on desktop, mobile, and servers, QtWeb is still a legal and technical minefield.

They also stopped distributing precompiled versions of Qt publicly, a baffling decision as it hurts their adoption rates even more.

From what I see, the Qt Company behaves as if web technologies don't exist. It'll be interesting to see how this strategy will play out for them.

There's still plenty of embedded shops stuck thinking "it's embedded so only thing performant enough is C++", despite having multicore SoCs with multiple GBs of memory and integrated GPU. But I agree (and certainly hope so) that the amount of those companies go down.

There are, in fact, still significant differences in price and energy use between "weaker" and "stronger" SoCs.

The license is simply LGPL for almost all modules. Non-LGPL parts are not essential and / or can be replaced without too much trouble (onscreen keyboard). The 5D chess is an illusion created by the Qt Company marketing department - you can simply ignore it.

I think what they're implying is that many people simply discount it as an option because it's not immediately obvious. I have had to explain Qt's LGPL status to MANY people.

Qt is already large enough, what license terms are needed to slim it down even further?

Congrats to the team. I ran this for quite a while and it's a great desktop, especially for older PCs.

I have been running LXQt for years. A really great desktop environment!

one of the best things that happens on linux DE

Looks cute.

I see what you did there.

This needs to be the official pronounciation.

It is. Always has been.

I confess I spent a decade+ calling it "cutie", though. To this English native speaker, it's more intuitive that way.

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