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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
