LXDE Previews Port From Gtk+ 2 to Qt 136
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."
Re:The only thing missing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why QT over GTK 3 ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:The only thing missing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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).
Re:Hmmmmmmmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
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.