LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

[Posted July 4, 2013 by jake]

The LXDE desktop environment project has a preview of its new Qt-based development branch (including a screen shot). It uses Qt 4, but there are plans to move to Qt 5.1 eventually. "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. Since gtk+ 2 is no longer supported by its developer and is now being deprecated, porting to Qt is not a bad idea at the moment."

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LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 4, 2013 21:11 UTC (Thu) by sciurus (guest, #58832) [Link] (13 responses)

It's nice to see that, at a time when there's lots of dissension among linux desktop projects, LXDE is cooperating with Razor-QT.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 9:55 UTC (Fri) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (6 responses)

The obvious migration path from GTK2 seems to port to Qt now.
I wish GTK3 and GTK2 would just die a little faster .. maybe Red Hat and Intel should stop funding people and work more with the qt-project. If those two would stop funding everyone would see that there is no future in GTK.
With OpenShot, Subsurface and now LXDE migrating away from GTK2 the road is pretty clear who has won the framework war. I just fear it will take RH really long to see that Gnome Classic is no option.(They already know Gnome Shell is none)

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 11:00 UTC (Fri) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (2 responses)

> With OpenShot, Subsurface and now LXDE migrating away from GTK2

Yes, the migration of these applications with billions of users is really compelling.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 11:41 UTC (Fri) by geertj (guest, #4116) [Link]

> Yes, the migration of these applications with billions of users is really compelling.

I agree the GP comment was a strawman. However, I think the point is valid. There is a huge difference in full-time staff dedicated to Qt vs GTK. GTK probably has a few full time engineers working on it at Red Hat (apologies I cannot find any exact numbers now), while Qt has more than 100 (source: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120808006582/en/D..., assuming most of the 125 staff mentioned are R&D).

Qt is going full-steam ahead. Qt5.1 with QML2 is awesome. It's a very modern graphics stack that can run natively and hardware accelerated on mobile platforms /and/ the desktop. If Digia manages to execute well, in my view, QML has the potential to replace HTML5 as the cross-platform mobile framework of choice. And with the benefit that the apps can run on the desktop as well.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 7, 2013 8:50 UTC (Sun) by Pawlerson (guest, #74136) [Link]

It seems you're not aware Ubuntu's doing the same. It seems gnome and gtk will be finally dead and that's a good thing for Linux.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 16:59 UTC (Fri) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

Well, obvious except for the "minor" issue that GTK is a C library and Qt is a C++ library.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 17:01 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link] (1 responses)

> The obvious migration path from GTK2 seems to port to Qt now.

Yes.

> I wish GTK3 and GTK2 would just die a little faster

No. As long as there are people who use it and like it, why should it die?

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 8, 2013 3:27 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Because a lot of people believe that Linux desktop is a zero sum game and that it wasn't the fact that KDE sucked as to why nobody wanted to use QT, but a giant secret conspiracy in favor GTK?

Just guessing since that seems to be a lot of the reasoning behind people's comments.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 11:37 UTC (Fri) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (5 responses)

... and more Qt-based desktops, period. While there are many excellent Qt apps out there (and Qt itself integrates in an exemplary manner with various desktops), for too long (before Razor-Qt, which is still not widely offered as a choice by distros) there is one "de facto" Qt-based desktop, KDE.

If you happen to dislike it on whatever ground (aesthetics, usability, take your pick here), there are fewer alternatives to go to.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 13:00 UTC (Fri) by maxiaojun (guest, #91482) [Link] (4 responses)

I rather see KDE as one kdelibs desktop.

Just try installing a simple KDE program on a non-KDE system, e.g., Windows, and see how much crap it would pull.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 13:06 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (3 responses)

It's not "crap" if the program actually uses it.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 16:09 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

[Meh, a bit of a tangent, but it tangentially fits here.]

While true, Qt has one part which is really poorly split up: QtGui. I'd love to make a command line version of keepassx, but it uses Qt and uses images, so it needs QtGui…which is huge. Yes, it also drags in X, but QtGui is also 10MB on its own which is quite a bit larger than X itself on my machine.

What should have happened (unfortunately, the ship has likely sailed here), is that all non-QWidget classes should have gone into QtGraphics or something so that manipulating pixels doesn't require the subsystem glue which can display them on screen.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 9, 2013 12:50 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

is thiw still an issue in Qt5? With the splitting of the Qt libs this should no longer be such a problem. Or is the splitting not finegrained enough?

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 9, 2013 14:33 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Based on a first look, it does indeed looks to be split out in a viable way, though the naming was backwards (QtWidgets was split out, not a QtGraphics). I'll have to move that back up the priority list.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 15:05 UTC (Fri) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (4 responses)

Interesting. Is there rationale for why they went with Qt rather than GTK+3 somewhere? The consensus seems to be that Qt is becoming more awesome than GTK+ by the day, but I don't know what's missing from GTK+3 for desktop applications.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 19:01 UTC (Fri) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

I don't specifically know what's missing from GTK3 either, but I fully agree. Qt5 is simply awesome, and programming with it is a joy. I just wish I had need to do so more often.

Last time I looked at GTK code it was a mess. There is NO contest IMHO which is the better toolkit.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 20:40 UTC (Fri) by tbleher (guest, #48307) [Link]

I'd also be interested in some further analysis. Switching toolkits must be a huge amount of work for little user-visible gain.

That said, the Qt Toolkit is very well designed, and I really enjoy using it for desktop GUIs. I also like that various other bits and pieces are integrated into the Qt framework (things like support for network sockets, loading SVGs, handling processes and so on).

The only really annoying thing about Qt is the large number of broken documentation links on the net (remnants of moving from Trolltech to Digia to qt-project.org).

Note to anyone moving a similar project in the future: Please set up sane URL redirects, so all the accumulated links in mailing list archives and forum threads continue to work. Thanks!

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 7, 2013 2:54 UTC (Sun) by el_presidente (guest, #87621) [Link]

GTK+3 isn't backwards compatible and is meant to be used with GNOME.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 11, 2013 7:43 UTC (Thu) by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032) [Link]

I for one was pushed away from gtk3 because of their insistance to auto-detect the presence of a touch-screen and turning off the ability to override that with user configuration (bug report). No such problems with Qt.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 5, 2013 22:03 UTC (Fri) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (6 responses)

So sad. One more DE removes itself from possible consideration as something I might willingly use. I have zero Qt apps installed, and I've seen zero Qt apps that I have any interest in installing, and I'm not going to install a whole GUI framework just for the sake of some jumped-up window manager. I already have athena, tk, fltk, and gtk installed, and I think that's more than enough. (Athena still has the best scrollbars, even if every other element of it is horrible.)

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 6, 2013 0:09 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm the converse, but YMMV. I'd have to be really, really sold on a GUI app if it uses anything but GTK+, Qt, Swing or SWT (I run Gnome Shell, and the latter three have decent-to-flawless look-and-feel integration with GTK+)

Disk and memory are no longer so constrained on most toolkits - the memory hog on my machine tends to be JS-happy browser tabs in Chrome

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 6, 2013 20:00 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, on the bright side, it's nice to have an lightweight alternative to KDE for people who tend to prefer Qt apps, but don't necessarily want a heavyweight DE. Now we'll have the Gnome/XFCE family, the KDE/LXDE family, and things like Enlightenment for those who want something that isn't tied to either side.

People who were using LXDE in part because it was GTK-based may be disappointed, but that may well be made up for by the happiness of some soon-to-be-former KDE users. :)

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 8, 2013 14:17 UTC (Mon) by vivo (subscriber, #48315) [Link]

> People who were using LXDE in part because it was GTK-based may be disappointed, but that may well be made up for by the happiness of some soon-to-be-former KDE users.

This is total nonsense; KDE is just so much more than a desktop that LXDE is not even comparable to it.
Now if you were speaking of KWin/plasma shell that could have been a point.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 8, 2013 20:21 UTC (Mon) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] (2 responses)

> I've seen zero Qt apps that I have any interest in installing

Try these:

. amarok (music player)
. okular (PDF/document reader)
. quassel (irc client (recommended!)
. k3b (dvd writer)
. konsole (multi tab xterm)
. qbzr (Qt based gui plugin for Bazaar)

Apps to avoid

. konqueror
. akonadi /KDE PIM

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 8, 2013 22:04 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I still use picard and kid3 fairly regularly. git-cola is a decent git frontend. For IRC, I used konversation, but I moved over to irssi before quassel was really popular. KDE comes with some decent games that I haven't really seen implemented elsewhere (e.g., shishen sho). krunner is also pretty damn awesome.

LXDE-Qt Preview (LXDE blog)

Posted Jul 9, 2013 12:52 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

skype perhaps ;-)