Razor-Qt: A New Qt-Based Desktop Environment

[DeepDayze]

Spot on. On my netbook, I actually am running KDE, in a minimal install with no KDEPIM, no Nepomuk, etc. It did take a lot of work to trim the fat. And, still, my bootup time is 36 sec to a full desktop (autologin) and the launch of a Konsole instance (I time that with a script). With razor, it is 15 sec. I also added a google-chrome launch to autologin (about 5 extra sec). So, he comparison is 20 sec against 40 secs to a full usable chrome from cold boot. I also added Plasma Active from a PPA; so far no luck (doesn't seem faster), but that?s promising.

I also installed razor-qt on my 3 core Phenom desktop. It logs in instantly (literally), in contrast to the few (10?) seconds it takes to log into KDE.

I am with you, I have a strong hunch that if someone really decoupled the basic plasma components in a practical way for the user, it would be very fast and low resource. But this should be a simple check for a ?Minimal KDE? in the System Settings, and also easy to pick up for a distro, so light KDE distros are a no brainer. I have a sad feeling that KDE, being built on awesome libs and a fantastic toolset, is too focused on very cool stuff that breaks on every major release (kmail2) and uses lots of resources with no obvious benefits (akonadi, nepomuk) in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the world is moving mobile, lighter, thinner, and cloud facing.

In other words, we?ll have a Windows 7 replacement by the time Apple and MS moved to what Google did 2 years ago with Android and now with Chromebook. Hope we see the elephant in the room before we get smashed.

Cheers!

Nice...definitely would love this myself as Razor-Qt can have a KDE personality that's quite close to the real deal yet less resources used. This DE should be more like a mouse rather than an elephant

[mendieta]

Plasma is window manager independent and definetly doesn't require Akonadi or Nepomuk to run. Almost all KDE daemons can be turned off and krunners and plasmoids removed. I have seen setups with complete Plasma desktop using about 160Mt of RAM with many services running in backround. I wouldn't be suprised if the difference between Razor-Qt and minimal Plasma desktop would fall to few megabytes. Plasma desktop as in itself isn't heavy at all.

One of Plasma Active's goals:
And that includes a lot more than just the shell (Nepomuk and Akonadi for one).

Spot on. On my netbook, I actually am running KDE, in a minimal install with no KDEPIM, no Nepomuk, etc. It did take a lot of work to trim the fat. And, still, my bootup time is 36 sec to a full desktop (autologin) and the launch of a Konsole instance (I time that with a script). With razor, it is 15 sec. I also added a google-chrome launch to autologin (about 5 extra sec). So, he comparison is 20 sec against 40 secs to a full usable chrome from cold boot. I also added Plasma Active from a PPA; so far no luck (doesn't seem faster), but that?s promising.

I also installed razor-qt on my 3 core Phenom desktop. It logs in instantly (literally), in contrast to the few (10?) seconds it takes to log into KDE.

I am with you, I have a strong hunch that if someone really decoupled the basic plasma components in a practical way for the user, it would be very fast and low resource. But this should be a simple check for a ?Minimal KDE? in the System Settings, and also easy to pick up for a distro, so light KDE distros are a no brainer. I have a sad feeling that KDE, being built on awesome libs and a fantastic toolset, is too focused on very cool stuff that breaks on every major release (kmail2) and uses lots of resources with no obvious benefits (akonadi, nepomuk) in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the world is moving mobile, lighter, thinner, and cloud facing.

In other words, we?ll have a Windows 7 replacement by the time Apple and MS moved to what Google did 2 years ago with Android and now with Chromebook. Hope we see the elephant in the room before we get smashed.

Cheers!

[rrae]

Running razer-qt now and well.. it works, that's for sure.
There are theme issues like some apps get the native Qt theme from KDE and some others get the Qt one that you see if you have absolutely no theme at all (like the razer config window). That same window isn't even honoring it's own setting of single click actions.

You may use qtconfig, gtk-chtheme and the Openbox settings.
I did so (setting GUI Style in qtconfig to Gtk+) and everything looks great now.

Screenshot: http://data7.blog.de/media/472/6086472_85e9b172ea_o.png

[Teho]

So, short of KDE spanning a Light version of Plasma without any ties to all these other components, I need an alternative.

Plasma is window manager independent and definetly doesn't require Akonadi or Nepomuk to run. Almost all KDE daemons can be turned off and krunners and plasmoids removed. I have seen setups with complete Plasma desktop using about 160Mt of RAM with many services running in backround. I wouldn't be suprised if the difference between Razor-Qt and minimal Plasma desktop would fall to few megabytes. Plasma desktop as in itself isn't heavy at all.

One of Plasma Active's goals:

The ultimate goal is to bring a fully functioning and smooth Plasma Active experience to devices with as little as 256MB of RAM and sub-1GHz processors. Plasma Active Two represents a significant step in that direction. Early feedback from testers during development of Plasma Active Two has indicated that the improvements are noticeable. Developers will continue to focus on this goal in upcoming releases.

And that includes a lot more than just the shell (Nepomuk and Akonadi for one).

[mendieta]

Promising for DIY Chromebook

I am a KDE user who happens to love Plasma, but who is really unhappy with the performance of several KDE components, such as KDEPIM in general, KMail2 in particular, and this is in no small part because of akonadi and nepomuk

Everyone at home uses Kubuntu, but as a light desktop: email is Gmail web-app inside Firefox or Chrome. Most of the time is spent in browsers, and occasionally LibreOffice, which can be also done in a browser.

So, short of KDE spanning a Light version of Plasma without any ties to all these other components, I need an alternative.

I put Razor-qt to test in my netbook. This is the setup:

* KDM set up to autologin
* KMix in Autostart
* nm-applet (gnome's) in Autostart
* google-chrome also in Autostart

This is a nice set up. This underpowered Mini dropped bootup time to a full desktop from 36 to 15 sec. In extra 5 seconds I have Google Chrome up. A couple things are still off:

* synaptic won't run from the menu (something with kdesudo or the gnome equivalent I guess)
* mimetypes are off, and not configurable.
* I still couldn't configure the wifi connection to work without me providing the keyring passwd (same happens in KDE FWIW, with the Wallet).

Overall, this is great. It tells me that by the end of 2012, someone could put together a great light distro mixing and matching lightdm-qt, razor-qt, and some KDE. Cheers!

[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.

[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).

[hal2k1]

Deleted. I misunderstood the original comment.

[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.

[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/