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Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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