LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment | Hacker News Reader

LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment

lxqt.org

150 pointsabaschin121 comments

The lightweight Linux desktop environments have been battling for years now over who's Windows 95 clone is better. It's a nice paradigm because it's familiar to many users and serves its purpose. However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience? Or does familiarity in this space just trump other concerns and experimentation should be left to the fat environments like Gnome, Unity, and KDE?

I think it's worth noting that there's never been a "weird" WM/DE that attracted a sizeable userbase purely on its own merits. Gnome 3 and Unity were to a great extent forced upon their users. If there were real benefits to means of desktop interaction that differed significantly from the established "Windows 95" and "tiling WM" modes, you'd think there'd be a few enthusiasts on the side exploring this realm and touting its productivity advantages.

I'd bet the majority of the lightweight "Windows 95 clone" WMs and DEs exist because GNOME and (to a lesser extent) KDE alienated their userbases by trying to be "different" and "next generation" (mostly by poorly cloning OSX and the latest Windows version that nobody liked anyway), so I'd hesitate to say that experimentation should be left to them.

EDIT: Many commercial products suffer from this problem where the existing version is "good enough" and people are happy using it for several hours a day, but the producer needs to convince users to purchase the new version anyway, so they end up adding a lot of pointless, irritating, and even product-breaking changes just to make the new version seem revolutionary and worthy of an upgrade, even if it's actually making the product worse. Many open source devs don't seem to have realized that there is no reason for them to play this game. They don't need to sell anyone a new version in a cardboard box, so there's no conflict of interest here; they can do less work and make their users more happy by keeping things stable and incrementally improving things. Yet, very often, they ape Microsoft, Adobe, and company's spastic thrashing anyway. More ribbons!

I agree. A desktop environment is one of those things where familiarity trumps innovations. It's like your living room. You might do innovating things in your living room from time to time, but most people would say that the living room itself should remain familiar, conservative, and all around comfortable. You really don't want to re-learn how to sit down in your own couch.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only time when a massive change to the desktop environment is warranted is when there's a massive change to the physical method that people use to interact with computers. The widespread availability of the mouse gave rise to the now-familiar WIMP paradigm. The introduction of multi-touch triggered another round of innovation, but I doubt that this can be backported to keyboard-and-mouse devices any more than Photoshop can be backported to mouseless terminals.

When Windows 7 came out I hated the new menu bar. After using it for a few years I curse Windows XP every time I have to use it.

Sometimes change is good. Just because we do something one particular way (in the world of desktop environments this is often down to a decision made in the early 90s) doesn't mean that it's the most productive method of doing it. Often initially unpopular changes in user interface prove to be more effective.

The problem is that change for changes sake is different to change for UI improvements sake, but the two are often hard to distinguish between. How do we know that a new UI implementation is better or worse than the old one? You don't really until it's being used in the real world. There's not an easy answer, but I don't think that grinding innovation to a halt is the right one. I guess the beauty of the open source world is that there's room for a minimal non-progressive UI as well as a number of innovative ones.

Yeah don't want to get into a big thread about the menu ribbon bar - but the principle reason it is actually worse is, each item in the bar is rendered differently, making it worse for learning by new users. XP-style text menus you could at least search methodically, pulling down each one and opening each submenu until you found something. The ribbon on the other hand, is hard to search at all with different fonts and text positions and icons all scrambled together.

So the menu bar wins now, but principally because its learned (the hard way). Now it would be even harder to switch to anything else.

I'm not usually one to initiate OSX/Windows comparisons, but it is rather surprising that menu searching isn't a thing on Windows.

While it's obvious that MS would have a reason, I have no clue what that could be. The only thing I can think of is that people seem to use Google rather than their app's help functionality even if the latter would do a better job.

Microsoft did implement a sort of menu searching with the revamped Start menu in Windows Vista. Anything that could possibly be accessed through the Start menu (programs, control panel items, administrative functions) can be searched by hitting the Windows key and typing.

The Office team, however, seems to operate more or less independently from the Windows team. The ribbon, for example, was first unveiled around the time Windows Vista was released, but Vista had no ribbon anywhere. Windows 7 added the ribbon to a few random apps, like MS Paint. Windows 8 added it to a few more random apps, like File Explorer. But they don't seem to be in any hurry to unify the look and feel of their own flagship products.

Well, what else could we expect from a company that thinks it's OK to slap two completely different UIs (Metro and desktop) on the same OS? Microsoft UI is schizophrenic.

Windows 7 was an incremental change within the WIMP paradigm. That's what differentiates it from the excessively disruptive, change-for-the-sake-of-change "innovations" that seem to be so popular nowadays.

I would be happier if experimentation had been left to the lightweight environments. The past ~ten years of GNOME and KDE "innovation" has led to a place where I'm not able to use Linux as a desktop -- I can't get work done in the well-supported/well-integrated environments, and I no longer have the time or energy to fight with the others.

If I want an environment for my cell phone or tablet, I'll use an environment designed for a cell phone or tablet; like Metro, Gnome, Unity and Android.

If I want an environment for my desktop, I'll use an environment designed for a desktop; like Windows 95 - 7, Gnome2, KDE3, Xfce and LXDE.

My desktop has a keyboard and a mouse, not a touchscreen. In fact, I really don't want to be touching my $1200 ZR30w monitor anyway, even if it were touch-enabled. Cell phone OSes on the desktop work about as well as desktop OSes do on cell phones. Play to strengths, do not reduce to the lowest common denominator.

If an idea objectively improves productivity, I will give it a fair chance. And we have certainly seen that since Windows 95: most notably with tabbed interfaces. But I can't stand change for the sake of change. Just because an idea is old does not mean it is bad.

“There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old, and therefore good." And one says, " This is new, and therefore better.” -John Brunner

I feel KDE4 has managed to keep close enough to a normal desktop environment, even though they've been touched by the braindamage known as "semantic desktop search", which insists on taking up tons of resources to index your half-terabyte home directory that you've already organised for easy access.

LXQt seems like it could become what KDE should have been. All they really need is to also merge with the Trinity people.

LXQt and KDE may be similar but they're not the same at all. A merge would simply be impossible, both on a technical level and on a social level (nobody would accept it in either community).

Forget Win95, something like AIX's CDE is all I ever really needed.

http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/

It's not all about resources. I don't want animations for every action. For me simplicity is elegance.

Having used CDE on both Solaris and Tru64 I can say that CDE was a steaming pile. The day CDE replaced OpenWindows in Solaris was a sad day.

Wow! You're the first person I've ever heard of who actually liked CDE. Did you ever actually use it?

In the late 90's I used these beautiful AIX desktop machines from IBM. However, I did spend the majority of time in the terminal window.

I installed FreeBSD at home and attempted to emulate the setup, but never got it quite right.

> However, does low resource usage necessarily imply lack of innovation regarding user experience?

If you care about UX innovation, LXDE is not for you. That niche is filled by KDE 4, Gnome 3, and Unity. With XP support ending, I've used LXDE (Lubuntu) to rescue 2 old family machines that Gnome 3 and KDE couldn't handle without thrashing.

How does the memory usage of LXQt Desktop compare to LXDE and Razor-qt? I hope they've managed to keep it down.

http://etoileos.com/etoile/

http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/

http://awesome.naquadah.org/

http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/

http://windowmaker.org/

etoileos - last news update 2012 and wasn't even about the project

fluxbox - active and kind've interesting

awesome - more of just a WM than full DE

ratpoison - ditto

enlightenment - okay, kind've resembles Win 95 too... but more of a DE than the others you listed

windowmaker - been around forever; hasn't really "innovated" in forever; just a NeXT clone if I remember correctly for GNUStep

I think my point stands. I was talking about LXDE, Xfce, and RazorQT.

>windowmaker - been around forever; hasn't really "innovated" in forever; just a NeXT clone if I remember correctly for GNUStep

>enlightenment - okay, kind've resembles Win 95 too... but more of a DE than the others you listed

> etoileos - last news update 2012 and wasn't even about the project

What you seem to be missing is that these projects died because people thought they were weird, which is to say, innovation in the DE space pays negative rent, and that's no good, especially not from the perspective of an open-source project, which, the social dynamics of open-source dictate that projects need to acquire a large userbase to sustain an active development community for more than a couple years, that is to say, to make people keep working on it after the "new project smell" wears off.

In other words your observation is a direct consequence of the choices in DE that users have made and continue to make.

The recent trend has been towards modularity, and while you dismiss awesome and ratpoison, a major boon of LXDE et al is that, unlike Windows 95, you can replace the window manager with xmonad and still use all of the other components of LXDE. Modularity brings innovation to the people who want it while satisfying the large majority of users who apparently do not.

There's no reason for LXDE to ship anything but Openbox; LXDE could certainly switch to xmonad tomorrow, but their users wouldn't be happy. And who wants that?

these projects died because people thought they were weird

Actually, at least two of those (E and WindowMaker) remain alive. And WindowMaker's got its fervent fans (you're hearing from one here).

While Raster's continued to plink away at Enlightenment, among the reasons WindowMaker development's been so modest is that it accomplished its mission: provide an implementation of the NexTstep interface. I use wmaker without most of the rest of the GNUstep tools (I find them kind of funky and cumbersome), but the window manager itself is simple, straightforward, and rocks.

It's also very similar under the hood to Aqua as used now in OS X, which for the most part just skins it differently and removes a bunch of features I like -- so while I love wmaker, I really can't function on Macs.

As for userbase. Yeah. I'm aware that I'm in the minority. I'm totally OK with that.

window maker was pretty great. I wish they kept going with it. It's still one of the best window managers I've ever used.

I love Window Maker and hope its development will go on, however, its lack of features really hurts, if you are an Asian language user and have an enthusiastic taste for typeface rendering. It is not a problem for Window Maker alone, but also problems in many other WMs that do not rely on a heavy and frequently maintained toolkit, i.e. GTK or Qt, as perfectly supporting font rendering and i18n has never been a simple job.

BTW, putting off window manager/desktop environment philosophy arguments, Input Method Engine is one of those constantly neglected aspects that really matter for East Asian users. It seems that the ones making plans for WM/DE and other infrastructure had little overlap with users, and their designing decisions were very likely to omit the requirements necessary to cooperate with IMEs.

I thought that font support was among the few changes which have been made in the past decade, though the most recent update affecting fonts was 11 May, 2005, adding gsfonts-x11.

I'm not enough of a dev to know what would be required, but pitching this to the developer(s) might be helpful.

As I said: you can still get it. It's packages with most distros (I'm running it on Debian).

The only thing that's not happening is a whole lot of development. And I'm actually totally OK with that.

Funny, ScytheWM was one of those obscure and relatively innovative WM, with its single, larger than the screen virtual desktop. Related?

etioleos actually does have some stuff happening, if you go and look at the mailing list :)

I really really think these projects need to have an automated notification to the devs to update their news page, or even automagically post a digest of mailing list activity. Lots of projects I've thought were dead have had lots of stuff going on behind the scenes.

> etioleos

dat Typo. "étiolé"= withered in French.

Well, Window Maker is basically a NeXTSTEP clone. If there is innovation it was done by NeXT in the late 80ies/early 90ies. So even an older concept than Windows 95.

Funny, I've been looking for something like ratpoison for a while, and though the name seems familiar, I had never tried it before.

I'm using it now... I think my search is over :)

Thank you!

You might also like i3. I tried many tiling window managers, and i3 is my favorite. Its "manual tiling" works well with my brain.

Also see this comparison of tiling WMs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_Tiling_Wi...

Thank you very much for your suggestion. I will try i3 in a few days -- once I know what ratpoison's and StumpWM's annoyances and strengths are.

Update: I lied. i3 looked too good to wait for so I tried it, and it feels a lot more natural. I'm quite certain this will be it!

Take a look at StumpWM. IIRC it's done by the author of ratpoison.

Bonus: If you're an Emacs user the interface/keyboard shortcuts should make you feel at home (or so I've heard).

Got into StumpWM about two months ago after living in tmux and emacsclient all day. Now I have a super minimalist desktop, all the key shortcuts I need (and mouse like I need, where as ratposion makes it a little too difficult), on the fly restart and command reload, Lisp, and oh my god so much flexibility.

Before that, I used XFCE. I have realized there is always another level of minimalism down from where you were before in Linux, until you hit the Linux console. But I love StumpWM. They might say it is not minimalist, but it is for me and it rocks my world.

I am going to hit submit and then hit a shortcut to open running term emulator and find my running mutt instance in tmux. Later full DE users.

I am overjoyed. Thank you :)

I've set a reminder to switch to StumpWM 2 days from now.

Emacs is something I've never tried though Lisp is amazing and that's reason enough to use it.

So many fun toys, so little time...

They all look clunky and unrefined.

Check out Elementary OS - Ubuntu with the DE rewritten in Vala with design as priority: http://elementaryos.org/

Why is Vala a "feature" worth mentioning? I mean, I don't use software and notice the language used to program it.

IMHO I've used buggy software that happens to be written in Vala, but I wouldn't say it is because of the language.

Sounds like another satisfied Apple customer.

So would that acronym be pronounced "looks cute"?

It should be, well played.

Not trying to be a problem here, but what problem does this solve? Why does someone undertake to make a new desktop environment? Is XFce/Kde/gnome/cinammon/what-have-you not enough?

I think there is a huge opportunity for a traditional, lightweight desktop that uses Qt. Both the Gnome and KDE camps have alienated large parts of their userbase during the KDE4/Gnome3 transition. I personally find both to be less usable than their predecessors. That leaves projects like Xfce/Mate to fill the gap. The problem with these environments is that they use GTK2, which is bitrotting. Migrating to GTK3 is risky in that it has essentially become the Gnome toolkit. It's version number and releases are synced with gnome and it regularly breaks old code and themes as well as bending to Gnome's UI vision. If LXQT can build something like a modern Gnome2 or KDE3 I could see them claiming a lot of happy users.

Are we ruling out icewm because it doesn't have a file manager and a "desktop"?

I was going to mention JWM and IceWM bit did not because these are window managers not desktop environments.

But this is partnof their strength - one thing done well, and allowig the user to add everything else they want.

the modern gnome2 already exists as 'gnome3 classic mode' or mate (which will support gtk3). lxde is also nice.

Gnome3 classic mode is mostly just Gnome3 + some extensions. The user interface is only superficially similar to Gnome2. Most things feel crippled compared to what came before it and it loses functionality on every release.

Mate is excellent and truly deserving of the title "modern Gnome2". It's my desktop of choice. Under the hood it's using a lot of Gnome3 tech while the user interface is familiar and usable for desktop users. The problem remains, however, that it is stuck with either a languishing GTK2 or at the mercy of Gnome with GTK3.

crippled, interesting.

Perhaps you'd like to explain further?

I don't have gnome installed anymore, but a few things I remember:

The window list extension doesn't allow you to change the order of windows with drag and drop and I'm not sure if its possible at all. You also have limited options when you right click on them.

The workspace switcher as part of the window list extension or the stand alone extension are now text only menus that require multiple clicks to change desktop.

You cannot drag and drop launchers from the application menu anymore, in fact you can't have launchers on your panel at all anymore.

The system monitor applet is not visible on your panel anymore.

gnome-control-center is extremely limited, you must also learn to use gnome-tweak-tool and dconf-editor.

Also, classic mode just looks ugly and there is probably no way to change it without getting your hands really dirty.

Many of the things listed above used to work in classic mode but the functionality was removed in newer releases. There seems to be a trend of removing functionality from the desktop and moving it all to the activities overview.

This essentially IS LXDE.. That project's developers merged with another team to work on this. LXDE's going to be maintained for a while, but I imagine it won't get as much attention anymore.

Problem 1: you have a slightly old machine (512MB or 1GB of RAM) or something like a Raspberry Pi and you want a resource-efficient but modern-looking desktop.

Problem 2: you want a VM with a DE but don't want to spend too much resources in it.

Problem 3: you have a modern computer but prefer to have a lightweight DE and let the rest of the resources be used by your applications.

Both LXDE and Razor-qt consumed about 100MB of RAM, I would expect something similar from LXQt. All the other DEs are heavier, XFCE is just a bit heavier but at least for me LXQt looks a lot nicer.

And as it was pointed out, it's a merger of LXDE and Razor-qt, so it's the complete opposite of the "many Gnomes" situation. Kudos to that.

Ok, thanks for that list. I pretty much had 'xfce' as the solution there but can see the user model of Qt being a good component swap.

I'll certainly build a VM with it to try it out, but my concern is that unless it gets some sort of traction it will just sort of fizzle out as folks graduate and move on to other jobs.

I doubt it. LXDE has been around for quite a while. It was already established when I started using it 5-6 years ago.

I've been using Mate (on Mint) happily, but I'll definitely give this a try on one of my laptops.

another usecase I've encountered is a single system hosting multiple users running persistent desktops remotely via x2go or tigervnc.

Deleted comment

They are both relatively slow, so it was reasonable to mention them both in the context of something which is useful for machines that are relatively slow.

Well, this is a merger of two of the what-have-yous, LXDE-Qt and Razor-Qt. So it actually reduces the number of desktop environments in the wild, by one.

This seems to be an evolution of LXDE which has been around for a while and is the default desktop on the raspberry pi for example.

As for why the switch the Qt, I'm guessing it's because the next version of Unity/Ubuntu will be Qt based so this will be more compatible with that.

My "eyebrow dismissal" comment seeing the title was "can we at least focus on current gen". But after reading this seems like a normal evolution of a well received project.

And Qt seems like is here to stay. So probably not bad decision from technical point of view too. It was nice when I used it.

LXDE is a lot faster than any of those, at least on my dev machine. I would recommend you give it a try. The difference was noticeable with Eclipse+Jumpshot+a full compilation of my project (a surprisingly common trio of things that I do).

I think Razor-Qt was created partially as a reaction to KDE4 launch which was less than stellar, bit similar to the Cinnamon vs Gnome3 situation.

LXDE on the other hand was specifically crafted for low-end systems. It's homepage says that it has been tested on PentiumII/266 with 192MB of RAM among others.

LXQt is the new merger of the two projects.

I'd guess the main idea is to try and create a comfortable environment for new users migrating from Windows.

Personally, I'm glad to be done with overlapping windows and graphical file browsers. I use Xmonad, urxvt and bash.

I don't like Gnome3 or KDE. I just need a bottom panel. I'm already used with configuring Openbox, LXDE is just a layer on top of that.

If LXDE wouldn't exist, I would just use XFCE.

Having used Fluxbox, Windowmaker, KDE, Gnome and Cinnamon, I find XFCE's start menu design the most productive. Recently used items appear on the top and you can start typing and the menu items start filtering - this happens for some other DEs as well but XFCE's matching is truely outstanding. I'm able to get to any item in less than 2 seconds (obviously I've assigned keyboard shortcuts to frequently used items) - very satisfying.

Well, this website isn't called Pragmatist News. Intellectual curiosity? Unhappy with existing OSes? Fun? Not a fan of a specific license? These are just guesses of course.

hmm I use KDE (latest) with indexing disabled, akonadi disabled, 3d desktop effects disabled

it seems very similar to LXQt and the project it replaces when it comes to resource usage and useability, except it is more mature and support a few more things.

Thats basically what keeps me on KDE. I would think KDE should disable akonadi and stuff by default personally - its super useable without all the heavy weight "crap".

Alt-F2, konsole and kwin basically are the reasons I use it.

Here's an example, too: I can tile my windows on any desktop i want with kwin without sacrificing non-tiling windows. I can even mix tiling and non-tiling. I dont have to remember 20 shortcuts for this, it works with the mouse too. Basically, its seamless.

(Thats also why I use it over awesomewm for example)

> I would think KDE should disable akonadi and stuff by default personally - its super useable without all the heavy weight "crap".

I agree. Unfortunately, they replaced Nepomuk with Baloo in 4.13 (I think; Baloo seems more aggressive than the former) and have effectively taken the stance that users cannot (easily) disable it [1]. It's somewhat infuriating, because adding your home to the ignore list doesn't appear to work as advertised and it'll happily index everything including /var (bug?), NFS mounts, and anything it gets its grubby mitts on. The only solution I found that works is here [2] because there's no longer a UI to disable it (unlike Nepomuk). Beyond that, you're absolutely right: With all the cruft disabled, KDE is quite nice (long time user here as well).

That said, I'm happy with KDE, and I enjoy it in part because of the eye candy (probably a poor excuse). I've used LXDE on an old laptop before but there are always features that I seem to miss. Otherwise, it's great for users looking to avoid the cruft or have limited resources. LXQt brings some of the clean appearance of modern KDE with it, so that's a definite plus. It makes me eager to take it a spin, then possibly try it out on that old laptop--which doesn't play nicely with KDE no matter what's disabled.

[1] http://vhanda.in/blog/2014/04/desktop-search-configuration/

[2] https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1390267#p1390267

From your first link:

"There is no explicit “Enable/Disable” button any more. We would like to promote the use of searching and feel that Baloo should never get in the users way. However, we are smart about it and IF you add your HOME directory to the list of “excluded folders”, Baloo will switch itself off since it no longer has anything to index."

This philosophy is why I stopped using GNOME and now prefer Xfce. I'm looking forward to trying LXQt when it's more stable.

Yeah, the developer has a really strange take on indexing. I got into a bit of an argument about it with him on a bug tracker. Baloo had decided that it would index all of my data files which are huge (multiple GB) which was going poorly for it and for me. The system is a wrapper around Xapian (http://xapian.org/) and Sqlite, as with any full text index when you try and put things which are huge into the index it is going to explode the index. Which is what happened to me. It also indexes source code which is fairly useless. (Although to be fair they have (today) blacklisted source code https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/reposito... )

EDIT: looks like 4.13.1 will also have a check box to disable Baloo! https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/reposito... which is great news.

> EDIT: looks like 4.13.1 will also have a check box to disable Baloo!

FINALLY. Thanks for digging this up. Having no means of presently disabling it through the UI seems unnecessarily user-hostile.

> Baloo had decided that it would index all of my data files which are huge (multiple GB) which was going poorly for it and for me.

As I mentioned in my previous comment, Baloo seemed to happily go about its business indexing precisely everything I told it not to, even to the extent of ignoring child directories of those I specified in the ignored directory list. I suspect that was a bug, but considering the suggestion in lieu of a button to disable the feature was "just add your home directory and it'll do the right thing" (which didn't work) is counter productive.

Sigh.

I can understand being excited about a new feature and (possibly) being one of its only proponents, and occasionally something good surfaces from such thankless chores. But I sometimes have to wonder what the motivation is to staunchly defend decisions that seem rather... myopic. Ordinarily I wouldn't care, but pounding the heck out of partitions and NFS mounts to do something that I can do quickly and simply with grep and find is just insanity.

On the other hand, now I understand why xapian-core is listed as a dependency.

I remember when I first switched to kde 4.0 and everything slowed to a crawl because some background process (nepomuk) thought it was a good idea to index the whole filesystem.

KDE4 has much improved since 4.0 regardless. much.

I more or less completely dislike change in my desktop environment. That said, I think there's room for some innovation, particularly simplification, in the Linux space. And if this creates a usable alternative for people, so much the better.

The first principle of GUIs is that there's been very little real innovation since the first demos at Xerox PARC at the Mother of All Demos 46 years ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos).

And there's been little reason for it. Once people understand how to interact with the basics of their interface, there's little gain, and a lot of cost, to changing things.

Most computer interaction is textual. Some isn't. Supporting text, formatted text, images, video, and sound is pretty much the entire scope of what needs to be done.

The best interfaces haven't changed much. Apple's Aqua interface is hardly changed from its introduction in 2000 -- that's 14 years. Some visual elements have been modestly restyled, and virtual desktop support added. That's pretty much it.

Other attempts to push radical UI changes on users have been dramatic failures, whether from Microsoft or Linux. Windows 7 was an absolute flop, and I'm among those who've been massively disappointed and frustrated by the GNOME 3 and KDE 4 transitions. While neither is my primary desktop, I do interact with them occasionally, and with apps designed for them more frequently. The experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, to say the least, as well as the attitude shown toward users by the development teams (Linus Torvald's outburst to GNOME was pretty much on point).

The place to experiment, IMO, is precisely where LXQT is: in an experimental space, away from the mainstream. If the desktop does prove useful, people will tend to migrate toward it, as has happened with the xfce desktop: not as featureful as GNOME or KDE, but vastly less frustrating and more useful (I also try it from time to time).

My own home? WindowMaker, which I've used for 17 years. I know it, it knows me, we work well together, and I see no reason to change.

Did you mean to say Windows 8? I think Windows 7 is doing just fine, and the UI didn't really deviate from before.

My error then. I'd checked and thought Metro was associated with Win 7. I've used Windows so rarely in the past decade I'm not familiar with the specifics of which UI goes with which release. Though now that I think about it, I've seen Win 7 and it's more similar to the Win XP interface.

Interesting; I didn't realize LXQt was the next-gen LXDE vs. just being a fork/sibling.

I'm currently using Lubuntu which is Ubuntu+LXDE but then with Xmonad as a window manager and really enjoying it.

I wonder if this will finally replace WindowMaker on my desktops. Don't laugh, it works.

WindowMaker representin'!

It totally does: fast, stable, restartable (kill -USR1 <pid>), lightweight, stays out of the way, easily configurable, portable config files, and a very, very, very consistent UI over the past 17 years that I've been using it (nearly a decade of which it saw virtually no dev activity and, frankly, didn't need it -- updates have started trickling in again).

Thing is, after nearly two decades, it's solidly ingrained into my desktop use habits. And while I try alternatives from time to time, they always leave me running screaming back to good old wmaker.

I remember WindowMaker impressing the hell out of me about a decade ago. Used it for a good while until I migrated to Gnome.

What about making a new Desktop not only fast, but also pretty? All the Linux Desktops look butt-ugly compared to OS X or even Windows 8 and absolutely don't make we want to give it a try. A nicely designed Desktop which is also fast and uses less resources would help getting Linux on the Desktops so much more...

> What about making a new Desktop not only fast, but also pretty?

The reason for this is that there are relatively few graphics artists who use Linux desktops and contribute to the desktop projects by creating graphics.

But there are quite pretty custom desktop themes created by people. You can look at /r/unixporn for example. Most of the screenshots there are from the tiling wm (dwm/awesome/xmonad/i3) crowd but every now and then someone posts some pretty Gnome/KDE/LXDE/Xfce screenies and themes as well.

Personally I feel that Gnome Shell is far more appealing than Windows (anything) or MacOsx.

I just showed a MacOSx user the alt-drag window resizing.... totally blew his mind, as in he couldn't understand why that wasn't a feature of MacOSx: "The Simple Operating System"

The reason is that there is no central steering to define the workflows of Apps and how and when UI elements should be used and how. That's why QT is used extensively in KDE, as it brings a lot of UI elements by default to alleviate this lack of steering.

Please make the new LXQt prettier and more modern, too. I wish I would use LXDE/Lubuntu on older machines, but it's just so ugly I can't stand it. I think the next best thing for people like me right now is the MATE environment for Linux Mint, but it does use a bit more resources than LXDE, too.

If you want pretty, check out Elementary OS [1]. Ubuntu with the GUI rewritten in Vala and prettified. Closest Linux to a Mac so far.

[1]: http://elementaryos.org/

Modern features tend to mean fancy-3d-compositing-features which are not lightweight.

I do think the default LXDE theme looks rather windows 2000/Gnome 2.6. However, changing the theme is not hard and LXDE can use any XFCE themes. Hopefully the new LXQt preserves that compatibility.

Every time I try LXDE I switch back to XFCE. XFCE is a lot more rounded and integrated. LXDE always feels just like a hodge podge collection of tools, that don't really work together.

I think the majority of dated-ness is due to icons.I bet if you install Faenza icons on this, it'll immediately look a lot more polished.

Depending on what you mean by "prettier," that would kind of defeat the purpose of LXDE.

For starters, they could try to get the spacing in and between UI elements right. For example, the text in drop down menus looks pretty misaligned in those screenshots.

That's the first thing I noticed on their homepage, the spacing looks off to me too. It's a matter of balancing tension between visual events, not something you learn in high school art class ;-) On the other hand, I'm usually on a laptop and want to cram as much information as possible into a small space. I love how Gmail has cozy, comfortable and compact modes!

So I have been using fluxbox for 7 years now and it does nearly everything I need. There is one feature that I have been looking for that I have not seen in any window manager that I know: the ability to group windows so that they raise and lower together. Yes I have virtual desktops, but I really, really want to be able to link the terminal window I use to test a file I am editing, to the vim window where I am editing said file.

Does anyone know of a window manager that can group windows so that they raise together? Or perhaps something more like: 'when I raise this window also raise these windows.'

Obviously you need a bit more logic to deal with the ordering of windows within a raise group, but this seems like a feature that is completely missing from all current window managers.

Honestly, I've always wanted a window-manager that mimicked Visual Studio's pin/dock slide-outs. That is, you can dock any task to any edge of the screen, and each edge can be sub-divided into panes. Each pane has multiple tabs, and each pane can be set to auto-hide or can be "pinned" to always-visible, which causes everything else to resize.

It's a rather complicated approach, but I've never found any better multi-tool layout, since it's enormously Fitt's-law-friendly while allowing me to both hide everything or bring in oodles of tool panes quickly and easily as needed.

I haven't tried them (just found out about them now), and I know it's not exactly what you're looking for, but there are WMs that allow you to have nesting virtual workspaces. It could be an approximation.

http://common-lisp.net/project/clfswm/

http://treewm.sourceforge.net/

Cinnamon is slowly moving in that direction I'd say. It has the ability to snap a window to the edge and have the dynamic-desktop size shrink to accomodate it (i.e. hitting maximize will only use the remaining unsnapped space).

I suspect it could be extended to use this to start setting up tiles automatically.

Qt runs fairly lightweight on top of the native BCM compositor of the Raspberry Pi. [1]

I wonder how this LXQt might compare to Maynard [2] resource usage.

[1] http://youtu.be/0j-Wakm5B84 [2] http://www.raspberrypi.org/preview-the-upcoming-maynard-desk...

Some years back, I worked with Qt 3.x and quite liked it. A pure Qt desktop would be interesting but I've never used LXDE. How does it compare to Openbox, which is what I use via Crunchbang? I realise Openbox is "just" a window manager so I'd like to know what additional benefits LXDE offers.

I'm a Crunchbanger too. Nobody can say Crunchbang looks like Windows95, just browse the forums and see what people are doing with it http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewforum.php?id=6

You might find some useful info regarding Crunchbang/LXDE here http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=24640

Part of the appeal for me as an artist and hacker, the Crunchbang community is incredibly creative. You can see the personality and careful attention going into the screenshots. Any pixel on the screen is fair game for customization. In my opinion, it's worth the effort to tweak your config files and get exactly the look you want. For me it's a balance between functionality, getting the most from my laptop's small screen, while creating a pleasant work environment that I don't despise.

FWIW I still use Openbox but disabled the decorations. I use pytyle2 to manage windows. Pretty much I use the Crunchbang default colors, dark but not too dark, works well at night as well as in daylight.

LXDE uses openbox as its window manager. So it's openbox with a more robust ecosystem build around it.

Removing LXQT installation is a PITA if you don't like it. http://askubuntu.com/questions/164941/why-removing-gnome-cor...

How come these things never look refined and polished? Always sort of half nice and Unix-clunk.

Funny you mention this, since I've noticed that even in ReactOS - which is supposed to be a Windows clone - there's something "not quite right" about it when you look at a screenshot like http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SN0tgsoHkV8/UwMdmx3RM1I/AAAAAAAAA3... - I think it's mostly the fonts. I've found that free (as in freedom) fonts just have this... odd look to them.

Fonts do make a big difference. In the case of ReactOS however, the version you are showing seems to be from 2008. This is from a current version:

http://cl.ly/image/0c0U1Q3l3Y1C

Personally I think it's the goddamn panel; I've never seen a Linux panel that looks as nice as its counterparts on Windows and OS X. It seems like a small component, but it really "frames" the whole desktop environment -- like a drumbeat -- and in both OS X and Windows there are some complicated gradients in the panel that I'm almost certain were insisted on by some tweed-clad hipster with a title half a sentence long; to my eye it really does make a difference.

The windows actually look really nice, especially considering it's the default skin.

It takes a professional designer (or rather, a dozen of them) to produce a professional-looking desktop theme. Which is exactly what the majority of FOSS projects lack.

When you let a programmer dictate the design, you end up with a lot of features and a lot of misaligned margins. In my experience, many programmers just don't care about pixel-perfect designs. Yes, I'm talking about the same group of people who scoff at typography because "the content is the only thing that matters", blah blah blah. Admittedly, I have no data to back this up, but I have a gut feeling that lightweight desktop environments are particularly teeming with this "function before form" crowd. When you treat design as a second-class citizen of your project, it's no wonder you can't attract good designers to work with you.

On the other hand, when you let a designer dictate the design, you end up with perfectly aligned margins and anti-aliased corners, but all the features and configuration options you care about are hidden behind five clicks and a keyboard shortcut, or worse, removed entirely because they somehow violate the designer's philosophy :(

OSX seems to make it very smooth.

Unix desktops always seem to have weird inconsistent margins and fonts that somehow don't look right.

Just doesn't feel nice.

Out of the box yes, generally clunky.

But those I have played with, KDE, XFCE etc. (disclaimer.. I haven't tried this one) are generally very tunable and can look quite nice when customized.

I agree with poster who mentions the panel though. Usually they aren't so good. Although with a semi-transparent panel my KDE desktop looks pretty good to me at least.

Graphics people are a lot harder to find in open source and on an open source budget. I'm sure if you have graphics skills and propose them to them they will jump on the occasion.

Wow blast from the past, it looks awfully like something out of the early / mid 90s

For some of us, that's all we want.

I'm using XFCE and Cinnamon on my Linux Mint 16. Can anybody comment if they think installing LXQt (via the PPA) could break my existing DEs? I really want to give this a try as I like to try out different DEs.

All these comments are good and all, but only Chromebooks and Ubuntu have brought forward a instant user friendly experience for users who don't want to Google around to get things working properly by default.

How does this version differ from what's in Lubuntu 14.04?

Does it have weather applet?

"Qt" and "Lightweight" do not go together.

Really? Qt used to be quite a bit snappier than GTK+. Is this no longer the case?

> OK, back to what most user will concern, the resource usage.

> To be honest, migrating to Qt will cause mild elevation of memory usage compared to the old Gtk+ 2 version. Don’t jump to the conclusion too soon. Migrating to gtk+ 3 also causes similar increase of resource usage.

http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1013

You are wrong.

1) QT works better when you not have accelerated drives (ie SVGA driver in X11)

2) The time in Nokia, QT was optimized to run in a mobile !! So must they tuned it to be more lightweight.

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