Razor and LXDE-Qt merging [LWN.net]

Jerome Leclanche has posted an announcement that the Razor and LXDE-Qt (LXDE ported from GTK to Qt) lightweight desktops will be merging under the LXDE-Qt banner. "So what happens now? Our two teams have met up and discussed the issues and we have decided that the best course of action for both projects is to focus on a single desktop environment, instead of two. There have been talks of "merging" ever since LXDE-Qt was announced. Having taken the decision to collaborate, we've all had the pleasure of working together already. Our plan is to cherry-pick the best parts of Razor and LXDE and include or port those to LXDE-Qt. Other components will be ported straight from GTK code or rewritten from scratch. In the end, we want to offer the best possible experience while reusing as much code as possible. It will not be an easy process and as always, we welcome anyone who wishes to help, be it with development, translations, or general feedback." In addition, Leclanche mentioned an offer to bring Razor (and now, perhaps, LXDE-Qt) under the KDE umbrella.

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Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 21, 2013 19:06 UTC (Sun) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (29 responses)

would there be interest in (possibly forking) LXDE (to create a version) on top of gtk+ 3?

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 21, 2013 19:53 UTC (Sun) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

I hope not.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 21, 2013 20:05 UTC (Sun) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

And then fork it from the GTK3 version to use Elementary. And then we can fork that one to use FLTK. And fork that one to use Tk. Finally we can fork that one to use Qt and call it LXDE-Qt-Reloaded. Progress!

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 21, 2013 20:09 UTC (Sun) by higuita (guest, #32245) [Link] (26 responses)

Why?

Why there is so many hostility to QT.
Yes, it's not perfect but GTK is also not perfet and GTK3 being build just to Gnome3 will make any non-gnome3 app based in GTK3 a lot harder to maintain.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 21, 2013 21:00 UTC (Sun) by hirnbrot (guest, #89469) [Link] (13 responses)

It doesn't have to be "hostility" - there is value in having everything use the same toolkit (though I've never succeeded in doing so, having a killer app each for gtk2 and qt4) and it may just be a nice exercise.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 21, 2013 22:21 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (12 responses)

As much as I dislike how much QT completely fails to integrate into every environment it is introduced into, despite suggestions to the contrary, I have no fondness for duplicated work.

If LXDE and Razor are having the same goals then I see it as the most intelligent move to give up their differences and just decide to work together with a common platform.

I really see almost no value to make a GTK3 version 'just because'. If they were trying to do something unique or special then maybe.. but a 'lite' linux desktop has been done do death yet never done very well so massive consolidation of effort is in order. LXDE was the closest I've seen to actually making something somewhat pleasant to use.

Hopefully this works out. Also it would be nice if they actually get solid guidelines on what resources are required to run the systems rather then just repeating the 'yet will still run well on weak machines' meme that is completely worthless to everybody.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 5:06 UTC (Mon) by mrdocs (guest, #21409) [Link]

Qt integrates nicely with KDE on *nix, OSX even OS/2 ;)

When people ask my "why Qt?" I say: "Let me rephrase that, 'Why would you not use Qt? '"

Amongst its real strengths: Cross platform, superbly documented, good performance.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 11:53 UTC (Mon) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link] (7 responses)

the light desktop has been done to 'death', Mainly because 'light' is a function of the user, it is not a universal thing.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 13:00 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (6 responses)

... and it's always pretty much terrible.

So people try again on their own and just crank out something else terrible.

"Light" desktops

Posted Jul 22, 2013 16:47 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

XFCE is a relatively "light" desktop and it's wonderful.

"Light" desktops

Posted Jul 22, 2013 19:26 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

It's marginally 'lite'r then Gnome or QT.

It's just as likely that you end up using more resources and have a slower machine because you depend on more third party functionality in the end as you to save anything.

"Light" desktops

Posted Jul 22, 2013 20:59 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

XFCE may be only slightly lighter than GNOME or KDE, but it's very much lighter in terms of being in-your-face. I find that XFCE mostly just stays out of my way and doesn't try to impress me with coolness or new paradigms. That makes it seem less resource-intensive even if it isn't actually much different.

Yeah, it's very subjective. ;)

"Light" desktops

Posted Jul 25, 2013 7:05 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link]

So it's much lighter than KDE or GNOME, not by using fewer resources, but by being more like Windows 95?

I fear somebody will have to explain the logic in that reasoning.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 18:27 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

"terrible" is a subjective term that covers heavyweight desktops too.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 19:23 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

a bit of a non-sequitur there.

Not that I disagree a whole lot.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 23, 2013 17:32 UTC (Tue) by FranTaylor (guest, #80190) [Link] (2 responses)

> I dislike how much QT completely fails to integrate into every environment it is introduced into

> I have no fondness for duplicated work.

Using terms like "I dislike" and "I have no fondness for"

are phrases people use when they really don't know what they are talking about. Without any sort of detail at all to back up your complaints? Perhaps you expect us to read your mind? Why do you bother to write stuff like this? You are not addressing the people who are in any sort of position to do anything about your complaints. You are like the person on the hot stranded subway car who complains about the heat. In reality people like you get smacked with a newspaper but I guess you can get away with it in cyberspace.

> it would be nice if they actually get solid guidelines on what resources are required to run the systems

Well perhaps you could write some solid guidelines on what it means to "run the system"? What does that even mean?

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 24, 2013 3:55 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> are phrases people use when they really don't know what they are talking about.

More often then that they are phrases that are used by people that are expressing a opinion, which is what I am doing.

> Without any sort of detail at all to back up your complaints?

What details do you want? It's not like anything I said was a secret.

I won't go into QT because it appears that it's a sore spot.

So I'll concentrate on the positive stuff:

I don't like duplicated work because it's inefficient and you end up with software that is inferior then if people just learned to work together and give up on their differences. All software sucks, all toolkits suck, all package management sucks.. It's all really terrible. Writing new toolkits or new software or new anything as 'alternatives' only really creates new things that suck in different ways. Only by spending a lot of slow grinding work fixing problems do things actually improve substantially. Things like the original split of GTK and QT was forgivable because the software licensing made accomplishing the goal of the Gnome dev's impossible, but since then it's been resolved and it's been a bit of a tragidy every since. It's true that sometimes you need to go back 10 steps to take 2 steps forward (ie abandon a approach that isn't working), but that's just the nature of progress.

And this is why LXDE and Razor all of a sudden got interesting, because they choose to work together. They didn't decide to go and create a new set of standards or guidelines or 'platforms' so that they can still do their own things, but actually decided to work together on the same thing for the same goal. This is a very promising thing. Really good news.

Also I remember how short of a time LXDE go to the point were it was decent, which was very short. So it makes me think that Razor is teaming up with a project ran by very competant people.

> Well perhaps you could write some solid guidelines on what it means to "run the system"? What does that even mean?

Well. Since you so nicely demanded a explaination I will attempt to give one:

When I say 'it would be nice if they actually get solid guidelines on what resources are required to run the systems', I mean to say: Quantify the amount of resources used by the OS and desktop system so people can know how much is left over to run their applications.

This is something LXDE got right and is why I would actually recommend using it for people who wanted something 'lighter'.

http://lxde.org/lxde

LXDE was probably the best of the bunch. Certainly one of the most usable. When it came out it was actually a breath of fresh air. I don't know how accurate those recommendations are nowadays, but it was certainly accurate when it came out.

Goto XFCE's page and they mention something like this:

https://wiki.xfce.org/minimum_requirements

> CPU: Intel Pentium I
> RAM: 32 Mb

Which is just plain silly. The other descriptions on that page are also not really accurate either. Like I mentioned before it is not unusual for XCFE to actually end up requiring more resources then Gnome or KDE as long as you stuck to Gnome/KDe's setup as intended by the devs.

Razor is easily the worst, referring to simply the ability to 'run on weaker machines', unless I am missing something on their website.

It's a nice thing to have these sorts of things quantified accurately. It's not the end of the world if it doesn't exist. Worst thing that happens is it just waste's a bunch of people's time trying to run the software on systems that can't really run it well and that creates a really bad impression and ruins credibility. I think accurate statements and documentation can create realistic expectations that helps to improve the experience massively.

For example: It's hard to get upset about software that runs like crap on a machine with 512MB of RAM when the software developer said you will need at least 1GB. Sometimes it can actually feel like you are accomplishing something by getting to run decently. However, it's very easy to get upset when the software developer, or at least a bunch of people claiming to be experts, says 256MB is plenty.

> You are like the person on the hot stranded subway car who complains about the heat.

That sounds like something I'd do if I was irritated about it.

But more importantly you said more then you probably anticipated:

By this very statement you are inferring that everything I talked about was blindingly obvious. Not only that, but I just made things more miserable for you by simply stating the obvious truth. Stuff you already knew and that you believe that everybody already knew, but nobody can do anything about.

Which means that your last sentance completely countradicts your desire to get any explaination at all from me and your claim you didn't understand what I was talking about.

> I guess you can get away with it in cyberspace.

Not to mention your entire post was intended to be a insult.

yay. I think I heard something about darkened kitchen appliances or something. I don't remember.

It was fun.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 24, 2013 11:26 UTC (Wed) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

> I don't like duplicated work because it's inefficient and you end up with software that is inferior then if people just learned to work together and give up on their differences.

A hint for you: "people just learning to work together and giving up on their differences" is just impossible. Even in centralized, Harvard-Soviet style Apple/Microsoft cathedral-software-building, people disagree and can't work in the way the boss wants and they leave, sometimes at the cost of their livelihoods.

And even if they could learn to sing kumbaya and row the boat all in the same rhythm and direction, it's only the most efficient way to fail because sometimes the pace and direction set by the driver -- or by the consensus -- is just plain wrong.

Wait! There is more! Duplication of effort is not only the only efficient way, it is the only where the probability of collective fail is lowered close to zero. For each Qt, GTK, Tk, FLTK and Java UI toolkit around there are thousands of Zinc, <consolestreams>, GEM, NeWS, etc.

As for the rest of your post, I agree that some "minimum requirements" postings are desirable, and that some are more accurate than others. That being said, you should remember that not always the projects have the possibility of testing and "certifiying" minimum requirements machines. (IOW: I agree with you, partially)

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 6:57 UTC (Mon) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

> GTK3 being build just to Gnome3 will make any non-gnome3 app based in GTK3 a lot harder to maintain.

What do you mean exactly?

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 7:58 UTC (Mon) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (10 responses)

What hostility? I don't *happen* to have any Qt apps that I use or want to use. If I were an LXDE user, I would be slightly upset that LXDE is forcing me to either A) install a whole nuther toolkit that I really have no use for, or B) switch to another DE, or C) replace and/or rewrite all the apps I'm used to and perfectly happy with.

Fortunately, I'm not a LXDE user, so I don't have to choose, but if I were, I would definitely be asking the same question. And I would probably be busy installing XFCE to see what that's like.

Of course, since I'm not an LXDE user, I'm happy to see a light-weight alternative to KDE appear, based on Qt, for those people who, unlike me, mainly use Qt apps. It's not a value judgement. I think people should be able to use the apps they want, and choose a DE to match. But I can certainly understand why some percentage of LXDE users might be unhappy about the change. That doesn't require hostility.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 8:04 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

Other than the apps tied to the desktop, are there really that many "QT apps" or "GTK apps"? that it's worth picking a DE to match the apps?

It seems to me that both camps have apps that suck for one niche or another, and so I would expect that the vast majority of people will end up running a combination of both (at least they will if they are allowed to discover the options, and the options aren't hidden from them because they are 'blessed' for the DE they are running)

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 10:48 UTC (Mon) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link]

> Other than the apps tied to the desktop, are there really that many "QT apps" or "GTK apps"? that it's worth picking a DE to match the apps?

There used to be K3b (CD/DVD burner for KDE), dunno if this is still the case, or if anybody still burns disks at all (I sure don't!)

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 16:35 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

For Qt, there's picard (MusicBrainz' tagging application) and qcachegrind (though mostly built as kcachegrind by distros) for which I haven't seen non-Qt-based variants which are sufficient.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 9:55 UTC (Mon) by cloose (guest, #5066) [Link] (1 responses)

Why are some linux users so restricted to a single UI toolkit or even care?

On Windows there are Java, .NET, Qt, wxWidgets, MFC and many more applications running simultaneously and no one cares or probably even knows.

So having just two toolkits (Qt & GTK) is actually a big improvement.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 23, 2013 21:25 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

We aren't Windows users almost exactly because we do care. Particular those of us on LWN want to poke at how our system works, and not just at a superficial level.

I don't know where you get "just two toolkits"; we share Java and wxWidgest with Windows and add at least Tk, FLTK, and Motif.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 12:35 UTC (Mon) by gilboa (guest, #23856) [Link] (1 responses)

You're missing the main point: Gtk 2.0 is dead.
LXDE had to chose one of two options: Port their code to Gtk 3 (with the additional dependencies you describe) or port their code to Qt.

Seems that at least to them, Qt was a better / cleaner / etc choice.

As for XFCE, its just a matter of time under they switch to Gtk 3.

- Gilboa

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 24, 2013 8:37 UTC (Wed) by tdalman (guest, #41971) [Link]

Congratulations to the Razor-Qt and LXDE teams to merge their development efforts.

I agree that LXDE HAS to move in near future towards an alternative to GTK2, and to me (that's really my personal opinion) the switch to Qt is a very good choice. It seems to me that GTK3 has become a feature-rich toolkit that has, alas, become large, bloaty, and still difficult to program.
Qt, on the other hand, maximizes the usability of the toolkit (i.e., it has a clean object-oriented API). I'm in particular stunned from the latest enhancements in Qt 5.1.

It is also very important to make a distinction between a Qt-based desktop environment and KDE. It is evident from the Razor-Qt project that it is possible to create a light-weight DE based on Qt (which is IMHO mostly interesting for owners of low-performance machines, developers, or performance enthusiasts), while KDE is a great feature-rich project that aims at satisfying a broad range of end-users.

After having used several DEs (Windowmaker, XFCE, KDE, Gnome 2 and Gnome 3) , I recently switched over to LXDE, and I really like it. Unlike with modern DEs, I can keep my accustomed (inefficient?) workflows with a traditional DE. I really tried KDE 4 and Gnome 3, and failed. So, I'm eager to see future developments with LXDE-Qt.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 23, 2013 11:48 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (2 responses)

> What hostility? I don't *happen* to have any Qt apps that I use or want to use. If I were an LXDE user, I would be slightly upset that LXDE is forcing me to either A) install a whole nuther toolkit that I really have no use for,
That makes no sense. If you use a Desktop that uses Qt, then you do have a use for the toolkit.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 24, 2013 10:11 UTC (Wed) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

It makes perfect sense. If you install a lean desktop you want all your applications to share as much memory as possible. When your applications are GTK and your desktop is Qt you effectively have to have both loaded into memory all the time.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 24, 2013 23:12 UTC (Wed) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> It makes perfect sense
No it doesn't.

> If you install a lean desktop you want all your applications to share as much memory as possible. When your applications are GTK and your desktop is Qt you effectively have to have both loaded into memory all the time.
You claimed you don't have a use for Qt, but since you're using a program (Razor, to be specific) that uses Qt, you obviously do have a use for Qt. You're contradicting yourself.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 7:57 UTC (Mon) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (5 responses)

Wouldn't having LXDE-Qt under the KDE umbrella just defeat the purpose? It's like having XFCE under the GNOME Foundation -- or MySQL under Oracle (</ducks>)

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 10:32 UTC (Mon) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (2 responses)

Is there any value to having the Phoenix^WFirebird^WFirefox project under the Mozilla umbrella?

There's really no problem having a differently-focused sub-project with specific goals working in the same tent. Sometimes it pays in the long run.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 23, 2013 2:43 UTC (Tue) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (1 responses)

There is no problem, except for brand dilution. The Mozilla projects all revolve around Gecko; in this case, it would seem that KDE is providing infrastructure in a way that ideally an organization like FreeDesktop should provide.

I'm a bit worried of this developing into the situation we have with Java - where one'd have to waste a lot of words to clarify whether one talks about Java-the-language, Java-the-platform, HotSpot-the-VM or (because some people still get this confused) JavaScript.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 29, 2013 7:25 UTC (Mon) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

You assume that 'KDE' is tied to any specific technology. Considering what's currently under the umbrella and what has been (owncloud!) that is not the case. See http://manifesto.kde.org/ for what makes KDE what it is and note the lack of technical details ;-)

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 11:19 UTC (Mon) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link] (1 responses)

You probably misunderstand "under the KDE umbrella" in the article. It doesn't have *any* technical bearings, so it could be Qt, GTK, or whatever based. It's a purely organisational thing where Razor/LXDE can use KDE infrastructure (git, reviewboard, mailinglists, but also communication channels to the outside such as planetkde, dot.kde.org, etc.), legal protection and so on. There it no technical requirements as in "you have to use toolkit ABC and link against library XYZ", this is completely up to the developers. Given that project administration and maintaining infrastructure is pretty distracting from actually writing code, sharing the organisational overhead with others makes a lot of sense in the world.

See http://manifesto.kde.org for details.

Razor and LXDE-Qt merging

Posted Jul 22, 2013 16:30 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

As an example, valgrind uses KDE's bugzilla at least. Does KDE provide other infrastructure as well? The repo URL is under svn.valgrind.org but maybe it redirects?

Who said that desktop enviromnets cannot be merged?

Posted Jul 22, 2013 16:16 UTC (Mon) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

It's nice to see lightweight desktop environments merging. It should bring more manpower to the combined project. I'm not a fan of Qt, but I have it installed anyway (primarily for Frescobaldi, a music editor). Having more eyeballs is more important than using a particular GUI toolkit (unless it's seriously flawed). I'm a user of LXDE and I'm going to try the combined project as soon as I have a chance.