Reading behind the link made me learn about Lumina desktop. I'm curious to why it is not making use of the LxQt effort? They seem to be pretty close in goals...
There is a very big lack of manpower, lack of designers, lack of general availability from sysadmins or developers competent at UX.
It saddens me greatly. I used to take care of releases, outreach and UX but focusing on my company means I don't have the time to do that anymore. Despite taking great care to reduce the bus factor as much as possible, right now, LXQt is stuck without a release because there's nobody that both cares about the project and has the time and skills to do this kind of stuff.
This is how the Linux desktop dies. A couple of "big" players doing their own thing and a plethora of small players never trying to partner up with similar projects. LXQt was successful for a long time because it was two small projects that merged into a larger one, but people move on and the momentum gets lost.
Sorry about LxQt. Wish I had some Qt experience to help out
So much for Freedesktop standardization...
For a long time, starting with Slackware 2.0 and for around 10 years, I wanted to use fully use GNU/Linux and used most of the distributions until eventually settling on Ubuntu. Which I only use on a travel netbook anyway.
As someone that is focused on UX and the whole desktop stack, never found a UNIX that cared about the user desktop experience.
Compared to Atari, Amiga, BeOS or even Windows.
NextSTEP was probably the closest to it, but even its UNIX underpinnings were more a side effect to speed up its development and make it easy to port software than anything else.
So my daily OSes have become Windows, OS X and Android. The fact that Apple and Google have a UNIX kernel is totally irrelevant for the programming languages I make use of.
It would not only ensure that LXQt's torch is carried on but also set a great example to all other open source projects that merging provides as great a solution as forking does, although for opposite problems.
The Razor-Qt merge wasn't an easy project - it took us almost 6 months to complete.
I wonder why not Xfce, specifically. Of all the DEs out there, it seems most complete in a sense of being an actual DE, with the usual configurability and stock apps that one would expect (a great file manager, for one). But at the same time, it's not the mammoth that Gnome and KDE are, gets out of the way easily enough, and doesn't demand that applications are aware of its existence beyond following XDG specs.
I'm running Xfce on two systems, one of which is Gentoo (in the default OpenRC configuration, no systemd), and the other is FreeBSD. Neither has Gnome installed - just recently I had to actually install gconf to do something, as a matter of fact, and was surprised that it wasn't there - but they handle Xfce just fine.
I believe it used Gnome settings daemon at some point, but it has its own these days.
That makes no sense to me, given that it runs on Linux as well as BSD.
From what I've read it relies on Qt, Fluxbox, XScreensaver etc, which are hardly BSD based components.
>as opposed to the Linux model where everything is developed independently and then glued together to form a distro.
What's the difference here ?
Lumina is developed independently, the components Lumina builds upon are developed independently of Lumina, it is then glued together with PC-BSD into TrueOS.
I would guess the primary reason is licensing. The other is a motivation to integrate with FreeBD/TrueOS specific things like ZFS and their administration tools.