LXDE Desktop Being Ported To Qt

[Luke_Wolf]

I didn't mean few people is concerned, but pissed. I think a lot of people, including myself, believe that from the very basics a state can't hide laws (the congress approved such thing, wtf?) from their people, since this wouldn't be a real representation: "how can I know I share someone's views in a subject if that person doesn't talk about it and I'm not even aware of the issue?", and also the whole spying on their citizens and non citizens thing (which is a layer up this) is too much, is kind of one of the arguments USA gave to be against communism: you are not free, and there is a police state that knows your every move (which isn't really true for the theory, but for the implementations we've seen). It's at least hypocrisy to then use the same methods "to protect us" (well, not actually "us", I'm from another country). But I interpret being pissed off as actually trying to do something against it. Not necessarily protesting, but for example migrating from Windows, or plainly quitting computers for the sake of privacy. This, I didn't see one around.

Want to know the funny thing about that?

Phone Tapping started in the 1950s by the FBI with the whole Red Scare. Ever hear of a fun little thing called ECHELON? That's right while we were complaining about the Soviet police state we were busy setting up our own, and not just the US but Europe was setting up their own systems.

Scanning of the internet was started under the Clinton Administration as early as 1997 with the CARNIVORE system, for the FBI, no doubt the CIA and NSA had their own systems at that time or even earlier but that's never going to be public record.

In 2006 use of a phone as a recording device without the individuals knowledge was ruled as acceptable by a judge in a case against one of the mobs.

There is soon to be a fleet of 30,000 UAVs flying over the US, no doubt armed with Hellfire missiles, and if not they will soon.

and of course NSA has PRISM going on, and the CIA is building a datacenter just to store all of the data they've been gathering...

and see this is what bothers me about people who complain about things like the Patriot Act or think that "Oh now this will be the final straw". The Patriot Act and things like the Defense Authorization Act only legalized what they were already doing. It's not like it's suddenly "Oh now it's legal and we can start" no it's "We're already doing this but we want to make a move we could potentially be called on publicly so we better legalize doing this".

[Awesomeness]

the point is they get 90% of the KDE developer resources

That's an outright lie. Only a handful of devs develop those features and these devs are not involved anywhere else.

which is a good reason why LXDE and Razor even came to be

Another wrong statement by you: LXDE predates those technologies.

Yes it is something that takes up lots of CPU resources and provides what are for me rather useless apps.

You just proved that you don't know at all what Plasma is.
Plasma is just a small (3MB) library that adds a few UI features to Qt to allow modular GUI creation.

After all even KDE seems to be focused on mobile now a days.

No.

PS: Even your inability to quote proves how clueless you are?

[DarkCloud]

Phoronix is no LXDE feedback forum.


Then don?t use them?



Optional.



Optional.

I don't, but the point is they get 90% of the KDE developer resources, which is a good reason why LXDE and Razor even came to be.


You obviously have no clue what Plasma even is.
> Yes it is something that takes up lots of CPU resources and provides what are for me rather useless apps.



LXDE is for desktops, not embedded.
> But maybe to grab traction they ought to go for something they really can conquer. It taks a lot of resources to do a fully blown Desktop OS. So many things today have HMI why not go there is my suggestion. After all even KDE seems to be focused on mobile now a days.


Qtopia was for phones, LXDE is not and never has been.
The QtMoko project is maintaining a fork of Qtopia.

> No Qtopia was developed originally for PDA's and embedded systems, latter it migrated to phones, but not a single Qtopia phone ever shipped (Except the Green Phone). QtMoko looks to be for phones


Those companies can pay to develop this then.

.

> Perhaps big companies might throw some resources behind LXDE if there was something there. Is there really anything wrong with having a few commercial cutomers behind LXDE

[Delgarde]

I'm pretty sure that's not true of widget theming, which pretty much every desktop environment seems to do - in fact, supposedly even within 3.x new versions often break themes developed for older GTK 3 versions. There's probably other stuff that normal applications don't have to do that's broken from 2.x to 3.x too. Worse still, this appears to be intentional - the GTK developers have said they don't care about non-GNOME consumers of GTK.

Ok, fine... widget theming. Do you really think that when someone is talking about the difficulty of porting an application from gtk 2.x to 3.x and the associated API breaks, he's talking about widget theming?

[nightmarex]

Plus nobody forces you to use windows 8. Windows 7 works just fine and it will continue to work for many years. Unlike linux where backward compatibility is just a joke. You're lucky if you can run an application from 10 years ago if it was unmaintained.

Grandia 2 for the PC. I'm still pissed about it.

I mustn't feed the trolls.... Ahh hell.

Back on topic, PCMan has said that he is still porting to the new GTK as well, this was just a side project, however with the feedback it's getting I bet it becomes flagship. I guess time will tell.

[Awesomeness]

Dear LXDE.

Phoronix is no LXDE feedback forum.

They seem to put so much energy into things I don't use or care about

Then don’t use them…

Semantic desktop

Optional.

PIM

Optional.

and Plasma.

You obviously have no clue what Plasma even is.

So I look forward to a new simple lightweight desktop based on Qt.

I would like to see LXDE throw out a super light weight desktop for embedded systems.

LXDE is for desktops, not embedded.

We used to have Qtopia for this, it was nothing fancy but for industrial design it was perfect. Qtopia has been gone for sometime now but there is nothing to feel its place.

Qtopia was for phones, LXDE is not and never has been.
The QtMoko project is maintaining a fork of Qtopia.

A lot of companies need a very light weight desktop that simply gives you a desktop with icon management to launch applications and control them, a lightweight IPC mechanisim, and maybe a package management system.

Those companies can pay to develop this then.

[PsynoKhi0]

The update that brings back the start menu and booting to desktop hasn't been released yet (at least in Europe).

Brings back the start BUTTON, big difference. There still isn't any start menu in 8.1.
"Supposedly most importantly, the Start icon is back in the desktop mode [...] However, this icon will merely flip your giant screen back to the stupid Start Screen." Source

Plus nobody forces you to use windows 8.

Unless you want dx11.2 which is win 8.1 exclusive. Source

So when everybody's done with the toolkit prick fighting, have a look at this:


From PCMan's response to the "OMG BLOATED" comments, here.
Now I know this must be a pretty barebone Debian installation, and automatic background processes that will find their way in e.g. Lubuntu are going to increase the memory usage by a fair deal, still I think it's looking pretty good.

[dee.]

I didn't know about the calls home and adware.

Read more:

http://log.nadim.cc/?p=78

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/microsoft-rolls-out-windows-8-ads-147248

http://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2013/07/02/microsoft-to-add-bing-ads-to-windows-8-1-search/

I can only talk about the ones I've tried to tell if it's harder or easier than Windows, that's why I mentioned Ubuntu specifically. I agree that they actually relate it because of familiarity, but in their minds it's "easier", because they are used to it.

Yes. Good thing my first "OS" was the system basic of C-64...

That's a stupid move from them.

Yes.

I wonder what would this mean to cloud lovers. A few days before of the NSA-gate, I had an argument with a friend (two friends, actually, but the other one shared my view) who wanted the world to go completely to the cloud, I mean, process the most you can and storage on central servers owned by x company and having only thin clients on the market, and I told him that then he doesn't ever know what happens to his data. My other friend didn't even need the privacy argument, but instead the intellectual property one: if I'm doing research, I want my data to be safe within *my* hard drive, so information doesn't leak before I get to issue a patent for my discoveries. If your *all* of your data is in someone else's servers, they can take it, and you have no way to prove that it's *your* research in the first place.

Cloud technology needs to address privacy concerns. A cloud storage needs to be implemented in a way that everything is encrypted automatically, so that even the servers don't have the keys, only the user does, and the keys need to be stored locally. The local app that connects to the cloud could automatically generate the key (open source, of course, so the user knows they can trust it) when the cloud account is created. If the user wants to add another device, they'd need to export the key and manually add it in to the other device, or there could be some automation mechanism for this, but it'd also need to be in the user's control and open source.

For other cloud services, similar safeguards should be in place, so that all user data is saved in encrypted form, and all the local apps need to be open source so the user can be sure nothing unnecessary is sent to the servers.

[DarkCloud]

Show the embedded worls some love

Dear LXDE. I think it is a wise decision to move to Qt, as it really is a ell thouguth out and well documented Application Framework. I am a big fan of KDE, but worry that it is moving away from my needs on the Desktop. They seem to put so much energy into things I don't use or care about - Semantic desktop, PIM, and Plasma. So I look forward to a new simple lightweight desktop based on Qt.

I would like to see LXDE throw out a super light weight desktop for embedded systems. We used to have Qtopia for this, it was nothing fancy but for industrial design it was perfect. Qtopia has been gone for sometime now but there is nothing to feel its place. A lot of companies need a very light weight desktop that simply gives you a desktop with icon management to launch applications and control them, a lightweight IPC mechanisim, and maybe a package management system.


Compared to a fully blown desktop this is really low hanging fruit. and I feel it would be quickly adopted by thousands of projects (commercial and open source) and all chip manufactures offering Board Support Products (BSP).

Please consider the embedded space for LXDE

[mrugiero]

About the interface, yes, I agree - there are many other stupid things about win8, including the schizophrenic nature of the OS, lack of consistency in the ui, bad discoverability, lack of intuitivity... but the main thing is, windows has always thrived on familiarity, and now microsoft is taking it away - that doesn't go well with the target audience. Plus there's the word-of-mouth factor, and when there's so much bad publicity about it... well, it's quite understandable it's a flop.

Personally, I think the worst aspects of it are the really sketchy ones... like how it reports back to ms every software you install on the computer (I hear this can be turned off, but that doesn't excuse it), the DRM, adware in the default apps... and the fact that the entire OS is closed-source and microsoft reports every vulnerability to NSA first, before patching them... of course, these probably aren't concerns for the average consumer.

I tried win8 briefly at a store computer and I didn't find it usable at all. It's so ugly and unintuitive, I got nauseous just trying it out.

I didn't know about the calls home and adware.

Well, most people don't even know Android is Linux-based - Android doesn't advertise it, and it really doesn't have anything in common with desktop Linux distros. Nevertheless, the popularity of Android brings more interest in Linux, it has shown Linux works great as a base for a mobile OS, inspiring the creation of several other Linux-based mobile platforms, so it's not all bad.

Not sure why you specify Ubuntu there though, there are actually many distros that are just as easy to use. Ubuntu just has that kind of reputation of being "a noob-friendly distro".

And I don't think it's really the ease of use that people relate to in windows. It's the familiarity - people perceive it easier to use because it's what they're used to (the so-called baby duck syndrome). But since windows 8 breaks that familiarity, the advantage is lost, and in comparison, moving to any "noob-friendly" Linux distro probably isn't any more difficult than moving to, say, from xp to 8.

I can only talk about the ones I've tried to tell if it's harder or easier than Windows, that's why I mentioned Ubuntu specifically. I agree that they actually relate it because of familiarity, but in their minds it's "easier", because they are used to it.

Win32 is available only for microsoft's own apps on ARM windows - ie and office and such. All other apps have to use the winrt API. So that might be one more reason why there seems to be no interest in developing for winrt devices - although the biggest reason is probably that no one is buying those devices...

That's a stupid move from them.

Well, most average people still think there's no alternative to using windows, and that installing an alternate OS is a daunting task - which it pretty much is now, thanks to "secure" boot. And no, I don't think anyone is "quitting computers" altogether - and not everyone is going to do anything about it, but at least there's now active discussion about things, people are more aware of the issue, and people concerned about NSA spying are no longer labeled as tinfoil-hats. And I've personally seen at least several people who have basically said, that the NSA-gate opened their eyes to the poor state of privacy and prompted them to research ways to keep their important private communications safe.

I think, even if the only effect of the NSA scandal is that more people are aware of the issue, if just the political atmosphere shifts so that privacy becomes a more mainstream issue - which is already happening, to an extent, then that can already have a positive influence on things in the future. We might have hope of avoiding a total surveillance society still. If enough people care about something and make enough noise, it can actually change the outcome of things.

I wonder what would this mean to cloud lovers. A few days before of the NSA-gate, I had an argument with a friend (two friends, actually, but the other one shared my view) who wanted the world to go completely to the cloud, I mean, process the most you can and storage on central servers owned by x company and having only thin clients on the market, and I told him that then he doesn't ever know what happens to his data. My other friend didn't even need the privacy argument, but instead the intellectual property one: if I'm doing research, I want my data to be safe within *my* hard drive, so information doesn't leak before I get to issue a patent for my discoveries. If your *all* of your data is in someone else's servers, they can take it, and you have no way to prove that it's *your* research in the first place.