
LXQt 0.11 Released - Tsiolkovsky
http://lxqt.org/release/2016/09/24/lxqt-011-et-al/
======
scrollaway
So while this is on HN, I wanted to talk a bit about LXQt and desktop OSes in
general.

Context: I'm one of the original leads on LXQt, and I initiated the merge of
Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt into LXQt.

I've been using LXQt as my main desktop for several years now. I've kept up
with what other desktops have been doing. I've been especially impressed by
the efforts of the GNOME team, and especially disappointed with the
clusterfuck KDE has become... but those are just details.

I feel like the Linux desktop is dead, and one of the worst examples of open
source software right now.

Almost nobody actually collaborates on anything. Everybody wants to do their
own thing and it leads to _developer fragmentation_. Every project is
undermanned. LXQt is _especially_ undermanned right now. The Cinnamon guys,
last I heard, want to switch to Qt but don't have the developers to do it and
would end up being a LXQt clone.

Nobody needs that many desktops, especially when nearly all of them are clones
of each other in either GTK or Qt and 95% of the apps duplicate each others'
functionality. The worst part is that, with more effort spent on cross-desktop
specs and evangelism, software written "for" one desktop would work far better
on others. But the XDG (cross desktop group) is in a pathetic state right now,
with nobody reading the mailing list and no specs ever being worked on. Nobody
cares, because very few people have enough context to see the need for it all.

Not to mention the sad state of UI toolkits right now. This isn't about GTK
vs. Qt or anything... but you can't pick up your favourite language (Python,
JS, whatever) and easily write cross-platform apps that work well on Linux. So
what does everybody do? They ship a god damn copy of Chromium in their app.
Bloody electron apps that, of course, respect zero accessibility settings,
platform integration out of the window etc. Because that is the easiest thing
to do.

It's pissing me off. Most people who care about their desktop have migrated or
are migrating to OSX and the whole thing snowballs.

TLDR: No collaboration across desktops. Fragmentation with no cross desktop
compatibility. 2016 was the year the Linux desktop died - won't anybody revive
it?

~~~
keyle
I feel it's somewhat a deeper change. Older developers are getting kids and
have very limited / no time to allocate for open source development
(unsupported financially).

Younger developers are chasing the golden goose on the web/mobile, or banging
frameworks until sunrise. They feel like old c++ codebase etc. are like old
ruins, in deep dark caverns. They wouldn't touch any of it. They're anti-
mailing-list and pro-slack. There is a huge gap between the two.

It's as if new generations come in and they want to make their own mark. And
there is what's sexy ("getting rich yo") and what's completely unsexy ("let's
pick up grand pa's code and move it forward on my mac book pro").

~~~
scrollaway
It's not like you can't make desktop development "sexy", though. You _could_ ,
but we're not there yet.

Qt is a pretty amazing framework (yes, I'm biased). You can write apps in
Python, but Python is a clusterfuck for shipping anything cross-platform or
any kind of desktop apps.

My vision for LXQt was to very much have a _modern_ desktop (targeting recent
tech such as fingerprint readers, wayland etc), while retaining some design
patterns from the classic desktop ("classic" taskbar or global menu, icon-
based desktop grid, etc) without trying to reinvent "desktop shells".

Working on the desktop doesn't always mean using ancient tech, nor solving
ancient problems - FWIW I'm probably younger than the average HN demographic.
We tried having/creating solid developer tooling, good documentation, a
decent-looking website but there's only so much you can do when you're lacking
manpower in every area. Nearly all my time was spent doing developer outreach.

~~~
keyle
Yes I really like your vision of desktop. And I'm not saying desktop dev is
unsexy. I'm a designer/ux/ui developer. There is tons of sexy stuff to do.
Just look at the VFX of scifi movies and take cues
([http://www.aspenexcel.com/](http://www.aspenexcel.com/)), desktop is stuck
in the past and could move forward.

What I meant is: the code base is ancient to them. The unsexy monolithic code
base that's not running on the cloud and doesn't emulate itself 3 times before
running. No new developer fresh of the boat wants to pick up large projects
codebase, they want to write funky new code from scratch with tons of bugs,
because that's where the fun lies when you're not paid.

~~~
scrollaway
Yah I got what you were saying. It just annoys me that this is the state we're
in.

I share your love for UX and UI development. For what it's worth, the LXQt
project could _really_ use people like you dedicating a few hours now and then
on drafting app designs, filing UX issues, etc. If you're ever interested,
file an issue on the tracker[0] and cc me (@jleclanche) on it.

[https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues](https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues)

~~~
acchan
How do you feel about elementary OS? [0] They spend a lot of effort on UX and
it's the project I personally believe has the most chance to push Free
Software to a wider audience, but on the other hand it's yet another project
contributing to fragmentation.

I'm not sure where they stand wrt XDG, but I bet if you asked them for help
with UX and designing stuff, they would love to collaborate.

[0] [https://elementary.io](https://elementary.io)

~~~
scrollaway
I like that they're doing some good UX work (although it's really just copying
apple's HIG... and style), but again it's not very interesting to have a group
of people working on _apps_ , when the apps themselves look like crap on any
other desktop.

On LXQt, I made sure there was no NIH. All the apps that came out of LXQt were
lightweight alternatives to bloated stuff from KDE and were "in scope" of the
desktop environment. Whereas Elementary includes an Email client.

To put things in context: An email client is office software. It's such a
burden to maintain that Mozilla dropped support for theirs (Thunderbird),
despite its massive userbase.

People work on what they want to work I suppose, but we're talking about apps
that are never going to be used outside of that one particular desktop. That
one desktop out of god knows how many, since everybody is working on their own
piece.

Are there really so many different ways to do a lightweight tabbed text editor
with syntax highlighting in GTK, that Scratch, gedit and Leafpad all need to
exist? Or can we admit there's a problem?

------
red_admiral
How much of this is due to fragementatation/walled-garden mentalities, and how
much due to issues with the C++/OOP-style API that most GUI/widget toolkits
seem to share? With fragmentation as a consequence of everyone exploring their
own solution to a genuine problem.

I'd say that the object-oriented style of GTK/wx/Qt/you name it is inherently
hard to use cleanly in a language like lua - not that it can't be done but you
constantly feel like "there must be a better way to do this". And then the kid
next door shows you a HTML5 interface that just makes you go "wow", and the
same again when he tells you he built it in 5 minutes. (The wow effect wears
off quickly enough once you try such "arcane" things as keyboard shortcuts, or
even getting a consistent TAB order half the time.)

It seems to me like everyone has realised that we need something better than
writing python while thinking in C++, and everyone's experimenting with their
own solution - hence why we have meta-object compilers and g-introspection and
whatnot. Perhaps that's necessary because I don't think anyone has made a
really good 21st century dynamic-language desktop application API yet that's
almost as quick to work in as electron, but gets things right. Possibly with a
sprinkle of functional programming and some kind of async thrown in.

You can't blame gnome 3 for not trying, but the amount of custom undocumented
CSS you need to hack on to do something like picking an accent colour for the
currently selected control make me think this is a really good learning
example of how not to do it.

------
aq3cn
Since when I have switched to i3 window manger, I am totally enjoying it. It's
minimal, fast, keyboard centric and perfect for computer with small screen
size.

[https://i3wm.org/](https://i3wm.org/)

~~~
lsh
If we're shouting out to our favourite window managers, then a long, long time
ago I switched to ion3 and then for a long long time it was left unmaintained
until Notion (not-ion) came along:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion3)

[http://notion.sourceforge.net/](http://notion.sourceforge.net/)

My sincere thanks to all authors and maintainers of ion3 and Notion. I've used
your work for at least a decade, probably longer.

------
sudhirkhanger
Any of you use a lightweight desktop environment like on high end expensive
system. Why? Does it matter if you end up using lightweight desktop
environment on a low end system and end up using resource intensive apps on
top of it?

~~~
int_19h
Those things aren't lightweight only in the matter of resources used - they're
also lightweight in how much attention they demand when interacting with them.
Some people just want a simpler flow with less overhead.

