Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

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I haven't used lxde so I can't tell you much about it. What I can tell you is that it has a "start" menu, a taskbar, a desktop switcher, icons on the desktop and Openbox :). It doesn't do anything that you haven't seen before, but pretty much everything it does, it does reliably.

It's... I dunno, it's like FVWM95, only from this century. I used Openbox + a bunch of tools cobbled together before. It doesn't do anything my old setup didn't do, but it sure is more comfortable. No scripts, no custom setups... all that was fun twenty years ago but I'm not a teenage l33t h4x0r anymore, I got work to do nowadays...

I'm not sure why people conflate it with Lubuntu, you can use it on any distribution, and the fact that it's very easy to package means there are few packaging-related problems with it. It's also pretty easy to compile from source if you need that, for whatever reason.

> it's like FVWM95, only from this century.

I wonder how you'd feel about Trinity Desktop Environment? I feel like Trinity and Lxqt are in the same space when it comes to system requirements.

They're a world of difference apart! TDE uses its own fork of Qt 3. Qt 3 is huge, and while Timothy Pearson, who maintains it, is an extraordinarily capable programmer, I doubt he and his team can maintain it and TDE that well. LXQT, on the other hand, can be compiled against the latest Qt 5 libraries. Besides, TDE isn't "just" the desktop, there's a whole application suite in there, too. I doubt that you'll get proper, 2019-level support for TLS, for example, in those applications. Bugfixes are occasionally committed but whether or not they're enough is anyone's guess.

Plus, you get all the usual problems, like inconsistent theming (Qt 3 engines, unsurprisingly, don't work with Qt 5; Plastik, CDE, Motif and Windows are in both Qt 3 and Qt 5 but you need to manually add color palettes etc.)

Frankly, even though TDE pushes all the right nostalgia buttons and even though I instantly feel better about anything with Pearson's name on it, I don't think I want it on my systems :). I tried it and it's fun but a bit difficult to use in 2019.

They're in the same space in terms of requirements but a very different space in terms of bugfixes, compatibility and perhaps security.

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