Submitted by “In the longer term, most Razor-qt components will fully be integrated into the LXDE-Qt and both teams will focus on the same project. Looking further ahead, the GTK version of LXDE will be dropped and all efforts will be focused on the Qt port. We, the main developers and administrators of the projects, will try to figure out where we align and where we have differences to grind out.”
That’s the best surprise I’ve had all year.
Yeah, it’s good to see stuff merging for a change, instead of forking.
Actually the plan is to wait until the merge is complete and the hard work is done.
Then we fork
That’s a forking awful plan.
I’ll just go now, shall I?
Absolutely. With so much desktop project fracturing going on, any convergence or coöperation is incredibly good news.
Cool. And now please get a real name for this.
Why not? How about the Lightweight Razor-Sharp Qt Desktop Environment for X11? LRSQDEX for short.
Sure you did not forget anything? Remember it is also ‘open’ and ‘free’!
I don’t know what to think yet. For one thing, I thought it was odd that LXDE decided to switch to Qt instead upgrading to GTK+3 as might have been expected, and originally as a GTK+ environment it complemented Razor-Qt well. When they decided to switch to Qt, I thought that maybe this is a waste, because now what’s the difference between it and Razor-Qt? Now that they’re merging into one, that solves that problem… but now will an ultra-lightweight GTK+3 desktop environment pop up to compete on the GTK+ side?
Anyway, very good news following LXDE’s announcement of switching widget toolkits, but it should be interesting to see how things turn out in the future. It’s kind weird though; after experiencing such drastic changes in desktop environments (and so many of them) over the years, here is yet another. And this time, after having switched to a tiling window manager without the complete desktop to go with it, I’m going to be witnessing yet another major change… only this time, from the sidelines.
The reasons for switching to Qt for the LXDE project was the extreme difficulty in making a low requirements system with GTK3.
Also in my view it looks like gtk3 in general i dying off on the desktop as more and more apps switch over to Qt. Soon enough we might have to use the GNOME project apps only, if you want to use gtk3.
I don’t know about that. Consider the number of desktop environments based on GTK+ vs. Qt since the GNOME project raised hell with their third major version and stubbornly refused to give people what they wanted. Cinnamon, Consort, MATE, Xfce. And then, after a few years they finally got the point that no one wants it and their “vision” is actually hurting them, so they came up with “Classic Mode”–which is still GNOME 3, but you could arguably consider it a different desktop environment.
By comparison, on the Qt side, of course there’s KDE… but after the whole KDE4 thing, although Trinity came into existence, it never seemed to pick up like the various GTK+ 2/3 environments (not even Debian has it). Unity is (or has already?) switched to Qt, so that’s one less on the GTK side. LXDE is switching, and with the merger of Razor-Qt (which hasn’t been around very long to begin with) you could say that this evens it out and doesn’t really make another tally on the Qt side, but it does take one mark off GTK.
So, I think GTK+ is still doing pretty good. It will take more than Unity jumping ship to kill it.
GNOME project already got saner again and incorporated a pack of extensions to make it mostly like GNOME2.
No. it’s *NOT*. The GNOME project is still a pile of stinking garbage that won’t run or run properly on machines that ran Gnome2 with little or no problems.
Edited 2013-08-03 01:56 UTC
I was talking about how the interface looks/features, not how it performs.
The Qt framekwork is really much nicer to work with and currently has a smoother upgrade process. If you have to choose to move to either GTK3 or Qt then it makes sense to move to Qt. I really can’t see the benefit of a project starting out fresh with GTK these days.
Qt != QT
Get it right.
Both project have similar goals and tbh I think this is the true spirit of open source.