Razor-Qt: A New Qt-Based Desktop Environment

[Teho]

Actually the theme and icons are part of the problem.

I guess we are lucky then that they are as easy to change as it possibly can be. In my opinion Oxygen is at least the best of the default themes included in any of the free desktop even though it suffers from inconsisency because of the recent updates to the folder and mimetype icons (which then again are better than the old ones). What comes to the applications themselves I just can't see the problem; there are some flaws here ("fonts" for example) and there but the fact that elements can be moved and removed make it possible to create extremely simplistic but usable UIs without any effort.

[89c51]

I guess we are lucky then that they are as easy to change as it possibly can be. In my opinion Oxygen is at least the best of the default themes included in any of the free desktop even though it suffers from inconsisency because of the recent updates to the folder and mimetype icons (which then again are better than the old ones). What comes to the applications themselves I just can't see the problem; there are some flaws here ("fonts" for example) and there but the fact that elements can be moved and removed make it possible to create extremely simplistic but usable UIs without any effort.

Even thought themes and icons are easy to change making a good one is massive work and requires talented people. In gnome things are much worst than KDE. People that design the Tango should be shot.

[Teho]

Even thought themes and icons are easy to change making a good one is massive work and requires talented people.

Just out of curiosity; are there any icon themes you like? As long as the theme is avaible in SVGs porting it shouldn't be that difficult.

[GreatEmerald]

Something tells me that some people who say that it's ugly are talking about GTK, and not Qt applications, which use an entirely different framework. And even that can be configured to match the Qt theme at least partially with the kcm_gtk package.

And lightweight desktops are useful also for embedded systems, like x86 tablets, that don't have all that much power.

[89c51]

Just out of curiosity; are there any icon themes you like? As long as the theme is avaible in SVGs porting it shouldn't be that difficult.

There are some in gnome-look that are really good. On my computer i use a custom one i designed from scratch.

[Awesomeness]

this desktop looks much less cluttered than KDE.

If you don't add any items to one desktop but then add lots of items to another desktop, the first one will look less cluttered.
I can make Plasma Desktop as ?clean? as Razor with few mouse clicks. (Or Plasma Desktop can be minimal by default ? that depends on the distributor.)

KDE suffers from a very inconsistent UI with options scattered everywhere,

No, you're confusing things.

weird/inconsistant text placement/alignment.

Again: You are confusing things. The desktop with weird text alignment is Razor.

Razor is on the left, Plasma Desktop's Folder View is on the right side.

For example compare the dialogue to add widgets in razor QT to the one in KDE4. Much cleaner in razor (and looks similar to the dialogue for adding panel applets in gnome/xfce)

The Razor layout is a verbatim copy of Plasma's old applet adder. It was abandoned because of usability problems. An inconsistent UI (which you bitched at before) being one of the reasons.

there are some flaws here ("fonts" for example)

There is no KDE component that does font rendering. If you have problems with font rendering, it's either the fault of Qt or FreeType ? both also used by Razor.

And lightweight desktops are useful also for embedded systems, like x86 tablets, that don't have all that much power.

No one in his right mind would want a traditional desktop metaphor on a tablet. For tablets there is http://plasma-active.org/

[Teho]

There is no KDE component that does font rendering.

That's why I put fonts in quotation marks. There was and maybe still is places where different font sizes and "stylings" like bold text and italic are mixed in few lines (the idea probably was to make it easier to understand but in the end it just made things look horrible). The fact that I don't remeber where such styling was used demonstrates how small thing we are talking about.

[hal2k1]

Deleted. I misunderstood the original comment.

[Nobu]

My desktop just can't handle KDE. with 1.5GiB of RAM, after starting Kmail and akregator, my RAM is pretty much full and there's some swap in use. Once I start browsing the web, RAM quickly runs out and the serious swapping begins; everything slows down. The solution is obviously to get more RAM, but at the moment that's not an option.

From what I understand, it has more to do with akonadi than KDE the desktop, but it still keeps me from being productive. So right now I'm using razor-qt with evolution, liferea, and pcmanfm, and the gtk qt theme (because it's simpler than trying to get gtk apps to use the qt theme).

[phred14]

I saw "RazorQT" posted to the front page of Phoronix a few days back and figured, "Yet another UI seeking phone/tablet space," or course keying off of the "Razor" in the name and associating it with the phone. Today I saw the Slashdot article and discovered that it's (another) lightweight desktop, which interests me considerably more.

I've been using icewm for years, but it seems long-in-the-tooth, and doesn't seem to be under much active development. Though it could be considered "done", there have been new desktop things coming down the pike, and though it can tolerate them, it doesn't necessarily play well with them.

I've also had xfce installed for my wife for years, but something about it rubs me the wrong way, personally.

So now this looks interesting, now to await (or maybe create - a first) a Gentoo ebuild.