
LXQt – The next generation of the Lightweight Desktop Environment - abaschin
http://lxqt.org/
======
WoodenChair
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?

~~~
wtracy
[http://etoileos.com/etoile/](http://etoileos.com/etoile/)

[http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/](http://fluxbox.org/screenshots/)

[http://awesome.naquadah.org/](http://awesome.naquadah.org/)

[http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/](http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/)

[http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/](http://www.enlightenment.org/ss/)

[http://windowmaker.org/](http://windowmaker.org/)

~~~
WoodenChair
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.

~~~
scythe
>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?

~~~
dredmorbius
_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.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
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.

~~~
ttflee
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.

~~~
dredmorbius
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.

------
uncletaco
So would that acronym be pronounced "looks cute"?

~~~
VogonWorkEthic
It should be, well played.

------
ChuckMcM
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?

~~~
Shamanmuni
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
jnbiche
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.

------
zobzu
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)

~~~
Zancarius
> 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/](http://vhanda.in/blog/2014/04/desktop-search-configuration/)

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

~~~
m_ram
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.

~~~
timtadh
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/](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...](https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/repository/revisions/cc9311c56a6fe1686d9996677e2ced5e92e6f85c)
)

EDIT: looks like 4.13.1 will also have a check box to disable Baloo!
[https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/reposito...](https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdelibs/baloo/repository/revisions/77a4ec2cd7e59035efe895e12912c0695b11deef/diff/src/file/kcm/configwidget.ui)
which is great news.

~~~
Zancarius
> 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.

------
dredmorbius
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](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.

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

~~~
dredmorbius
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.

------
stephen
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.

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

~~~
dredmorbius
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.

------
Lunatic666
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...

~~~
exDM69
> 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.

------
higherpurpose
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.

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

~~~
Debilski
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.

~~~
pjbrunet
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!

------
hyperion2010
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.

~~~
Pxtl
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.

~~~
Zecc
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://common-
lisp.net/project/clfswm/)

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

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

------
cgh
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.

~~~
pjbrunet
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](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](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.

------
known
Removing LXQT installation is a PITA if you don't like it.
[http://askubuntu.com/questions/164941/why-removing-gnome-
cor...](http://askubuntu.com/questions/164941/why-removing-gnome-core-does-
not-remove-all-of-its-dependencies/164952#164952)

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

~~~
scythe
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.

~~~
kijin
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 :(

~~~
andrewstuart
OSX seems to make it very smooth.

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

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

------
noisy_boy
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.

------
stevenwagner
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.

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

------
known
Does it have weather applet?

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

~~~
jamesgeck0
Really? Qt used to be quite a bit snappier than GTK+. Is this no longer the
case?

~~~
mhitza
> 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](http://blog.lxde.org/?p=1013)

