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GUI Open Source

LXDE Previews Port From Gtk+ 2 to Qt 136

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the long-live-trolltech dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As the PCMan at the LXDE blog lets us know, the work on a port of LXDE to the Qt platform is showing promise. As the developers stand to face the deprecation of Gtk+ 2, migrating away from the popular toolkit will soon be necessary. The developers note that migration to Qt 'will cause mild elevation of memory usage compared to the old Gtk+ 2 version,' but clarify that a similar increase in resource usage is expected of a migration to Gtk+ 3. Yet, the port to Qt is ongoing, and clearly taking shape, as the screenshot shows. An official release might be a while, though. As an update to the post notes, the plan is to use the recently released Qt 5.1 in the future, which we might not see in distros for some time." They are also cooperating with the Razor Qt desktop. From the weblog post: "...We subscribed razor-qt google groups and discussed about possible cooperation earlier. Currently, the ported LXDE components are designed with Razor-Qt in mind. For example, PCManFM-Qt and LxImage-Qt will reads razor-qt config file when running in razor-qt session. We’ll try to keep the interchangeability between the two DEs. Further integration is also possible. Actually, I personally am running a mixed desktop with LXDE-Qt + Razor-Qt components on my laptop. Components from the both DE blends well."
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LXDE Previews Port From Gtk+ 2 to Qt More

LXDE Previews Port From Gtk+ 2 to Qt

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  • I already have QT and such installed on my LXDE machine due to a couple of KDE apps I fell in love with. They work fine under Openbox/LXDE, so shouldn't be much of a problem to convert over to the new QT based DE.

    • Re:Hmmmmmmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dcnjoe60 ( 682885 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @10:47PM (#44201053)

      I already have QT and such installed on my LXDE machine due to a couple of KDE apps I fell in love with. They work fine under Openbox/LXDE, so shouldn't be much of a problem to convert over to the new QT based DE.

      The problem isn't running QT based apps under Openbox/LXDE. The problem is rewriting LXDE componets to use QT to draw to the screen instead of GTK2. They are basically rewriting the panels and all the other components to call QT libraries instead of GTK2 libraries.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xtifr ( 1323 )

      On the other hand, I have no Qt apps installed, and no particular interest in any Qt apps I've heard of, and I'm not going to install Qt just for the sake of a jumped-up window manager. So this pretty much removes LXDE from the list of WMs/DEs I'm likely to try.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by takeya ( 825259 )

        I was in the same boat but I finally adopted VLC as my media player and it depends on the basic Qt libraries. It is so much faster to start and uses the least memory of any video player, for GTK+ or Qt. It really proves to me that Qt code can run just as fast as GTK code, even on a primarily GTK machine.

        Also bear in mind that LXDE has not yet announced any plans to drop GTK support, but GTK3 team has been openly dismissive of anyone not developing for Gnome in specific, so it may be inevitable.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Xtifr ( 1323 )

          I am way too much in love with the power and flexibility of gstreamer. VLC is what I recommend for my friends who use Win or Mac, but for my own style of random hacking around, gstreamer is a better fit.

  • Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05, 2013 @07:38PM (#44200159)

    Serious question, I'm assuming that there was a specific reason for going with QT and not GTK3; anyone know why?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dosius ( 230542 )

      I've heard the Gtk3 devs are actively trying to prevent their stuff from being used outside of apps intended for GNOME 3 itself.

      Not sure how true that is though.

      • Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:5, Informative)

        by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @07:49PM (#44200223) Homepage

        XFCE is doing fine with the transition so I assume it wasn't too much of a problem. Also I quoted the guy who made the switch for LXDE and he didn't mention that issue. He mostly thinks that GTK3 is the same weight at Qt and since he liked Qt better once they were the same weight it became the better choice. Since GTK3 isn't that similar to 2 it was roughly an equal porting effort and that's why he switched.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )
        Whether that is true or not the naming convention they've used effectively makes it as if they are deliberately getting in your way if you are trying to have a mixed GTK2 and GTK3 environment during a changeover. They have brought something like DLL hell to *nix for the first time in that old and new software cannot interact since it can't tell the difference between old and new vital components that act differently. That seems to have been deliberate to avoid any abandoned portions of gnome creeping into

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by bkor ( 21535 )

          What do you mean? You should be able to run gtk3 run fine on any distribution. It doesn't matter one bit if that is some Qt based distro (KDE/whatever), some Gtk based distro (whatever version, 1.x, 2.x, 3.x) or whatever else.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by dbIII ( 701233 )
            Simple - there's various backends (not libraries) in gnome2 and gnome3 which behave differently, are incompatible and are called with the same names. Try installing the most recent gimp on the most recent version of CentOS or RHEL and you'll see an example of what was broken by this decision. You've got to either remove everything that needs gtk2 or give up on anything that needs gtk3. I can see why they did it (they wanted a clean slate and not have support old apps) but it still pisses me off.
            • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I've heard the Gtk3 devs are actively trying to prevent their stuff from being used outside of apps intended for GNOME 3 itself.

        Not sure how true that is though.

        I don't think that the Gtk3 devs are trying to prevent others from using their stuff, but Gtk3 is actively being developed to suppoert Gnome 3 and particularly gnome-shell. As such, there are lost of changes from one release to the next of Gtk3 that are not backward compatible. That is fine for Gnome 3, but not for others trying to use the libs.

        It is anticipated that eventually, the changes will settle down and things will stabalize, but right now, GTK3 is a moving target. Since desktop environments like LX

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bkor ( 21535 )

          That is not true. The only changes that are invasive is for themes. However, that is due to the move to css for themes and once that is done, it'll be easier to theme things. So aim is not to make things difficult, but unfortunately to make things easier it sometimes is more difficult temporarily.

      • GTK 3 without GNOME is going the way of udev without systemd, read for example

        https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/2012-November/msg00044.html [gnome.org]

        • Funny your mentioning systemd, as I was just thinking about that earlier today. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of it, for several reasons, and I was gratified to see that (for now, at least) Pat Volkerding has kept it out of Slackware.

          However, I suspect that sooner or later, everything will depend on it, and unless we introduce forks of udev, we'll be stuck with it, just like many distros are with pulse audio, which I really do hate. It is my contention that "pulse" stands for Pretty Useless Load of Supe

        • If they simply stated than GTK should be considered a gnome component versus gnome independent, that doesn't necessarily bother me as it is a game of semantics. However, the key sentiment that strikes me as counter-productive:

          "You can't just write something for 3.0 (be it an application, a shell plugin or a GTK theme) and expect it stay working that way forever. Instead you need to constantly improve on your work."

          Which is a huge 'screw you' to backwards compatibility. To say that reworking perfectly wor

    • Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @07:45PM (#44200199) Homepage

      I don't know who "PCMan" is on the LXDE team but he is the author and here is what he wrote

      I, however, need to admit that working with Qt/C++ is much more pleasant and productive than messing with C/GObject/GTK+.
      Since GTK+ 3 breaks backward compatibility a lot and it becomes more memory hungry and slower, I don’t see much advantage of GTK+ now. GTK+ 2 is lighter, but it’s no longer true for GTK+ 3. Ironically, fixing all of the broken compatibility is even harder than porting to Qt in some cases (PCManFM IMO is one of them).
      So If someone is starting a whole new project and is thinking about what GUI toolkit to use, personally I might recommend Qt if you’re not targeting Gnome 3.

      Update 2013-03-27:
      I got some feedback about the toolkit choice above. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that gtk+ is bad and did not intend to start a toolkit flame war. If you’re going to use python, C#, or other scripting language, gtk+ is still a good choice due to its mature language bindings.

      Vala is attractive initially, but after trying it in real development, you’ll see the shortcomings of this approach. Because it sometimes generates incorrect C code that still compiles, we got some really hard-to-find bugs. So we need to examine the generated C code to make sure it does things right. This takes much more time than just writing plain C code myself. Besides, the generated C code is not quite human-readable and debugging becomes a problem. Another issue that’ll hit you is the problems in the library bindings. Though there exists many vala bindings for various C library, their quality is uncertain. Finally, debugging, examing, and fixing the bindings all the time takes even more time and offsets the time saved by using Vala.

      To sum up, for compiled binary programs, Qt IMHO is a good choice to consider if you don’t hate C++.

      • Personally, I've never tried Qt, but I can attest to the horrible backwards-compatibility of GTK+3. Luckily, most everyone just uses Glade, so most of the time it's not *too* bad, but there are still problems and shortcomings there. However, I don't think you can really write an entire DE using Glade alone... I also think QT is the smarter choice because development on the Ubuntu Phone uses Qt w/ QML, and I believe LXDE's most thriving distro is Lubuntu. I assume this also means that we may be able to u

      • Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:4, Informative)

        by sidthegeek ( 626567 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @08:59PM (#44200551)
        PCMan is the original author of LXDE.

      • This is a fairly balanced statement (I especially like the "if you don't hate C++"). But it's also obviously a subjective experience, and YMMV.

        I found Vala/Genie to be an amazing development experience: C#/Python-like linguistics, but with the true C ABI, with automatic wrapping for dynamic languages. GObject is ingenious! But it is also true that Vala is still in beta: some bindings might be broken, and Genie has some serious linguistic failings, but it's not a big deal to fall back to C when nothing el

      • Vala is attractive initially, but after trying it in real development, youâ(TM)ll see the shortcomings of this approach. Because it sometimes generates incorrect C code that still compiles, we got some really hard-to-find bugs. So we need to examine the generated C code to make sure it does things right. This takes much more time than just writing plain C code myself. Besides, the generated C code is not quite human-readable and debugging becomes a problem. Another issue thatâ(TM)ll hit you is the

    • Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @08:42PM (#44200465) Journal
      I can tell you why I wouldn't.......

      Both QT and GTK3 are fine GUI development environments. However, the GTK team doesn't have a commitment to maintaining backwards compatibility, which means if you write your code for GTK3, you can expect to rewrite it in a few years, with little real benefit. When choosing between two decent platforms, why not choose the platform that is more stable?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by bkor ( 21535 )

        Can you give a reference to where you found that GTK 3.x wouldn't provide backwards compatibility? This as it should.

        • Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:4, Informative)

          by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @09:48PM (#44200827) Journal

          Can you give a reference to where you found that GTK 3.x wouldn't provide backwards compatibility?

          Sure. I strongly recommend clicking on this link [gnome.org] from the summary, where you will find this sentence in the first paragraph: "GTK+ 3 is a major new version of GTK+ that breaks both API and ABI compared to GTK+ 2.x." It then goes on to discuss in more detail the changes that will break compatibility.

          • Yeah and GTK+ 2.x was API/ABI incompatible with GTK+ 1.x, pretty much setting an expectation that the whole thing will be overhauled approximately once a decade. So whenever GTK+ 4.0 is out, your 3.x apps likely won't just compile+run as-is in the new version, but there's no reason you can't have all the older libraries installed at the same time.

            GTK+ 2.x apps aren't magically breaking and GTK+ 3.x apps won't magically break either.

            • Sure. And in the worst case I can just compile GTK 2 myself, which is the great thing about open source. I just see no reason to invest in the platform when there are other, more stable options available.

              • The problem is that GTK3 has utilities which are names the same as GTK2, so you can't have both installed at the same time.

                • Linux comes to the rescue, there are ways to compile things so that you link to a specific version of the library. Having both installed at the same time is not a problem.

                  • True, but it does complicate things. Seriously, if you're going to provide a tool with incompatible functionality, at least name it something different. At the minimum append a version number.

            • GTK+ 2.x apps aren't magically breaking and GTK+ 3.x apps won't magically break either.

              Obviously you haven't tried to take source code written for GTK2 and recompile it agains GTK3. It may not be magically broken, but it is definitley broken.

              • I think he meant that you can still compile GTK2 apps by using the GTK2 libraries. Which is true but still leaves a problem......

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by geek ( 5680 )

            What annoys me is how themes break between minor versions with GTK. I'm sick to death of GTK and have been for 8-9 years. GTK was never meant to be used the way it has been. It was the Gimp Toolkit and nothing more until the Gnome devs came along and bastardized the whole thing and laid hack upon hack on it until they sorta got it to work. Time to flush the turd.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The Qt toolkit is object-oriented (making it nicely modular) and has a nicer API. Plus Qt makes it easier to port software to other platforms. The Qt devs also appear to be making it easier to port applications between versions where GTK seems to take bigger leaps. Really, if you need to transitio, or start from scratch, Qt has a lot of little points in its favour.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        OTOH, it's easier to interface other languages to libraries written in C. And Qt is owned by Noika, which isn't currently a big improvement over Oracle. (Trolltech was, and was dependable. I'm not at all convinced that Noika is. OTOH, they currently seem to be less actively antagonistic towards end users than do the Gnome developers...though I will grant you this is purely a personal perception, and not objective.)

    • Serious question, I'm assuming that there was a specific reason for going with QT and not GTK3; anyone know why?

      Feeping creaturism and bloat? Per TFA, QT is getting to have a smaller footprint than GTK3.

    • From a user standpoint, I have a different question, or a variation of this one. Why would anyone who needs a Qt based environment prefer LXDE, which is just beginning now, over Razor-qt, which has been around a bit and has a considerable headstart? Although I'd welcome these 2 merging, if that's what happens.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jbolden ( 176878 )

        I think your premise is wrong. LXDE is way ahead of Razor-qt. LXDE is undergoing a change of widget sets that's a much easier task then Razor developing an entire desktop layer that LXDE already has. LXDE is one of the 4 main open source GUIs, there are solid distributions which use LXDE as their environment. Qt is just a widget set for LXDE. I think merger makes sense and the Razor code might speed up LXDE's migration. But that's all Razor codebase can offer some code for some components that might

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by armanox ( 826486 )

          Which would wonderful to see that level of cooperation, and some great things could result. RazorQT is very close to what i want from a DE, and LXDE works pretty well too (I'm a fan of QT over GTK).

  • The only thing missing... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ....Is a world class browser that uses QT. Firefox and Chrome both stick out like sore thumbs with some QT themes (like Oxygen-transparent).

    If I'm forced to have gtk+ on my system, might as well make use of it.

    • Re:The only thing missing... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by interval1066 ( 668936 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @08:01PM (#44200293) Journal
      I'd like to see all Linux projects standardize on Qt as a their Gui toolkit. I understand why everyone has their own but the war is won and Qt won it.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by cheesybagel ( 670288 )

        Personally I hate the Qt APi. It has its uses. The cross platform capabilities are a lot better and it has a lot of functionality built-in that you can only get as separate external libraries with GTK+. But I disagree that it is better to program for. GObject may be verbose but to me the object model, class hierarchies, etc make a lot more sense.

        • Personally I hate the Qt APi

          Why? Its an API. Stiil, that said, it makes more sense to me than others, GTKMM included. Even though similar I tend to remember Qt apis better for some reason.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Anonymous Coward

            My shop had to move from the X/Motif toolkit to something else. It would port easily to anything that provided a void *user_arg to routines that allowed information to be passed into callbacks. GTK provided this, QT did not.
            Going to GTK was a port. Going to QT would have been a rewrite, actually a complete redesign.

            We went with GTK and never looked back. However because of the changes in GTK 3 we will probably be sticking with GTK 2 for the next decade or two.

        • Personally I hate the Qt APi. It has its uses. The cross platform capabilities are a lot better and it has a lot of functionality built-in that you can only get as separate external libraries with GTK+. But I disagree that it is better to program for. GObject may be verbose but to me the object model, class hierarchies, etc make a lot more sense.

          I possibly didn't fully understand your comment. You expressed that you don't like the Qt API, but in the last sentence it looks like you actually favor Qt over GTK. Seeing GObject referring to GNOME and object model & class hierarchies belonging to Qt.

      • Re:The only thing missing... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by RedHackTea ( 2779623 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @08:40PM (#44200453)
        Here's a good history by RMS: http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2000090500121OPLFKE [linuxtoday.com]. Note that since then, Qt is now under the GPL v2.1; however, because of the history, I think most developers fear tight integration with it. "Will they ever remove the GPL in a new version one day?" is the thought in some people's minds. A lot of F/OSS may sound ridiculous and like paranoia, but it's paranoia that keeps companies like Microsoft out of the OS that we geeks love so much. Having said all of this, my personal opinion is that Qt is fine now and that the paranoia is unwarranted, but it still exists.

        • Re:The only thing missing... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05, 2013 @09:08PM (#44200595)

          Most importantly, the KDE community, way back when Nokia bought Trolltech, has managed to get in the contract a clause (still valid under Digia ownership) that says if Nokia/Digia doesn't release new versions of Qt under a free license (currently it is - to correct you a bit there - under the LGPLv2.1) for 12 months, then everything is automatically given to the community under a BSD license.

          http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

        • the paranoia is unwarranted, but it still exists.

          It may well be there, but there's also a marginalization of Qt/KDE by some of the largest distros (perhaps with that canard). If you look at the companies backing them, you'll see many @bigco addresses on the GNOME-related software teams and many, many fewer working on KDE. So I think some of it is simply NIH, but perhaps with a business strategy aspect of, "Who is Digia and why should BigCo be dependent on them when we have an alternative we control, even

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by jbolden ( 176878 )

            I think this dates back to the early Gnome 1 days. Compaq, Debian, Eazel, Free Software Foundation, Gnumatic, Helix Code, Henzai, Inc., IBM, Sun Microsystems, and VA Linux Systems were the guys behind Gnome 1. That's where the big company support started.

            The big company Qt guys were SUSE (Novell), Turbolinux (Asian still big) Conectiva (now merged with MandrakeSoft to form Mandriva) and Caldera (SCO).

            When Nokia owned Qt directly that certainly helped but Nokia was very parochial in its interests. Both

      • Pissing Contest By Users (Score:4, Interesting)

        by tuppe666 ( 904118 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @08:58PM (#44200543)

        I'd like to see all Linux projects standardize on Qt as a their Gui toolkit. I understand why everyone has their own but the war is won and Qt won it.

        War..Won!? All I see is healthy competition, and personally I run a whole host of Applications that I don't care what toolkit they are in. Having a look around there are some absolutely stellar QT applications http://calibre-ebook.com/ [calibre-ebook.com], k3b http://www.k3b.org/ [k3b.org] (although not in development for a while), MP3 Diags http://mp3diags.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] and of course Clementine http://www.clementine-player.org/about [clementine-player.org]. There are a few programs that can run either that I use Transmission http://www.transmissionbt.com/ [transmissionbt.com] and Avidemux http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/ [fixounet.free.fr] . But the Bottom line is GTK+ seems as popular as ever, and still more popular than Qt.

        What is most bizarre is this about this is LXDE is looking great, a Desktop we don't hear about often enough, and is looking like a desktop I would use...half this discussion is about lets be honest a license subtlety I don't care about.

        • Since k3b has worked perfectly for me nearly every time I've used it in the last 7 years or so... I'd say those devs are kicking back and admiring a job well done..

          I don't understand why Transmission is so popular. Must be because the Gnome users don't know about KTorrent.

          Speaking of GTK apps... Would you believe Mozilla Sunbird 0.9 still runs on a modern KDE4 desktop?

          (I have a need for a standalone calendar app that reads and writes remote ICS files, and it seems silly to run Thunderbird on that machine wh

      • I'd like to see all Linux projects standardize on Qt as a their Gui toolkit. I understand why everyone has their own but the war is won and Qt won it.

        Because it was a commercial library for a long long time and people went with alternatives, similar to LessTif vs Motif back in the day.

        • Who used LessTif? GTK was invented by the GIMP guys (early versions used Motif).

          • Who used LessTif?

            Everybody who didn't want to pay for Motif, for whatever reason

            Sadly, by time it get really compatible it was mostly obsolete.

            GTK was invented by the GIMP guys (early versions used Motif)

            I bet most linux GIMP users were *not* linking against commercial Motif.

          • Who used LessTif? GTK was invented by the GIMP guys (early versions used Motif).

            Back in the day before GTK, just about everybody used LessTif. No way were they gonna pay big time beaucoup bucks for Motif to run some GPL 1.x code. There was even a Linux wm that ran off LessTif. Linky [catcode.com] for those interested in what we hadda deal with back in the day...

      • Re:The only thing missing... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by afgam28 ( 48611 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @10:40PM (#44201007)

        I don't have anything against Qt, but what makes you think that it "won"? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major open source desktop applications that use Qt (other than those bundled with KDE). They all use GTK+: Firefox, LibreOffice, Chrome(ium), Gimp, Gnome, Eclipse and every Java app that uses SWT (and every Java app that uses Swing emulates GTK+ not Qt).

        • Skype?

        • Re:The only thing missing... (Score:4, Informative)

          by darthium ( 834988 ) on Saturday July 06, 2013 @03:58AM (#44202023)

          I don't have anything against Qt, but what makes you think that it "won"? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major open source desktop applications that use Qt (other than those bundled with KDE). They all use GTK+: Firefox, LibreOffice, Chrome(ium), Gimp, Gnome, Eclipse and every Java app that uses SWT (and every Java app that uses Swing emulates GTK+ not Qt).

          VLC media player is qt-based

          And this other is less known but even more impressive, Velneo: www.velneo.com It's a RAD tool, where the awesome productivity is cross platform.

          Check a full-fledged ERP, running i Android http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXluV5jvmc0 [youtube.com] The very exact set of advanced corporate features are available in Windows, MacOSX, Linux and Android. In the video, it is shown accessing a remote database in realtime. I tested it on my own, you develop once, and you don't have to know anything advanced about Windows, Android, MacOSX or Linux, to run the software you developed in such OS.

          The power of Qt is noticeable in Velneo, and I talk after a decade and half of experience in software development, including using mainstream development tools.

          • I had a click on the Velneo link... it might be awesome, but its in spanish(?) so that would put most people off it immediately.

      • I'd like to see all Linux projects standardize on Qt as a their Gui toolkit. I understand why everyone has their own but the war is won and Qt won it.

        Ironically, didn't Gtk (and Gnome) come from disatisfaction with the original license QT was released under years ago (and since remedied)?

      • It was never a war. It was a balance between two options, each with advantages and drawbacks. Three, if you count the Enlightenment libraries, and I would very much like to. Choice is healthy.

    • Re:The only thing missing... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Joe Tie. ( 567096 ) on Friday July 05, 2013 @09:29PM (#44200753)
      How many times has firefox been ported to qt at this point? I remember at least two separate times that it almost got into a usable state but was then abandoned.

  • Huge icons... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why do the tool bar icons have to be huge and child-like?

  • To me, this is a good thing if it joins with and speeds up Razor-QT development. Many times I wished for a lightweight QT-based desktop (but realistically, I'm so content with XFCE+openbox I'll probably never switch)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by armanox ( 826486 )

      RazorQT is getting there. Been using it as a DE on some older systems (think P4 era). Have that next to TDE on one laptop.

  • Yay. More projects should port from crappy bastard hack oop GTK to properly object oriented QT. GTK is just pathetic. I always notice when a program uses GTK - dialogs suck, widgets often require two clicks, one to focus, another to ack (what the fuck? this is the 21st century) interface is usually simplistic verging on nonfunctional and defaults are terrible. All things that OOP helps a lot. Especially defaults. Plain old C is the enemy of good defaults. Speaking as a verteran plain old C hack, including a

  • LXDE should ship with a desktop compositor. Currently there is horrible tearing going on all around, and of course using the 3D acceleration of GPU would be a nice thing to utilize.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by armanox ( 826486 )

      So use Compiz

    • I fixed a brand new laptop yesterday, dual core 32nm Atom with PowerVR graphics and 1GB ram. It can only do X11 (not even xv). On a desktop from 1999 (pentium 3 with ATI Rage Pro) you will get xv but no OpenGL still.

    • BTW it's up to you to use another window manager (compiz?) and this is easy, change a line in lxsession's configuration file.
      LXDE is not really a DE, as you can use any component interchangeably. You can for instance use only pcmanfm. Or use everything LXDE but not use pcmanfm. It's mostly true of something like mate or xfce as well, but here the dependencies are pretty minimal.

  • Why not fork GTK+ 2.0 and keep maintaining the fork?
    That would keep the Lightweight X Desktop Environment being a lightweight desktop environment for X ...

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