Razor & LXDE-Qt Desktop Projects To Merge

[teahopper]

XFCE and MATE should merge as well.

[Melcar]

This may make LXDE worthwile. Will monitor this with interest.

[dee.]

It's about damn time 2 DE groups join. This will really help reduce fragmentation,

What fragmentation? The idea that many DE's causes "fragmentation" is just plain wrong. Fragmentation in the context of DE's is nothing but a buzzword term that is used incorrectly - kind of like how ignorant people have started using "FUD" as a synonym for "anything I disagree with".

If each of these DE's were completely incompatible with each other, so that you couldn't run software designed for one in another, that could actually be called "fragmentation" - but this isn't the case.

[schmidtbag]

That's really awesome news. I use Razor-qt on a netbook (which I just migrated from Mageia to Gentoo to get a bit of a speed boost), so this is some really relevant news. Both projects joining forces should help a whole lot. Also, if LXDE-qt is the new direction of LXDE, that's even better news: this move just eliminated 2 rather redundant DEs (LXDE, LXDE-qt, Razor-qt -> LXDE-qt) and made LXDE differentiate from XFCE.

I completely agree, although I didn't find XFCE to be all that comparable to LXDE anyway. They both have names that are/will be obsolete, they're both GTK2 focused, and they're both on the light-weight side, but XFCE is considerably heavier than people think. XFCE has a noticeable performance hit on low-end devices compared to LXDE. I do, however, feel that XFCE makes a much better general-purpose DE. I wish it had more developers because I think it could easily be the best DE if it just got a little more attention.

[GreatEmerald]

That's really awesome news. I use Razor-qt on a netbook (which I just migrated from Mageia to Gentoo to get a bit of a speed boost), so this is some really relevant news. Both projects joining forces should help a whole lot. Also, if LXDE-qt is the new direction of LXDE, that's even better news: this move just eliminated 2 rather redundant DEs (LXDE, LXDE-qt, Razor-qt -> LXDE-qt) and made LXDE differentiate from XFCE.

[Awesomeness]

If you just cut down the .desktop files to the bare minimum attributes and edit them by hand, its not so bad.

The error message I got was 'File " " could not be found' or something like that with the empty string between the quotation marks as my personal usability highlight.
BTW: LXDE's .desktop parser does neither mandate the .desktop file extension, nor does it mandate the Executable attribute, causing a grave security risk roughly equal to the .pif epidemic from a few years ago on Windows.

I personally like LXDE because it doesn't really force you to use anything, so it's pretty easy to tweak it exactly as you like.

That's the case with every modern DE. Some packagers may just be too stupid.

Anyway: I hope with the added manpower from the Razor team that the merged product will be a lot better.

[schmidtbag]

Personally, I found LXDE a usability nightmare ? mostly because of its broken .desktop file parser.

I didn't think it was that bad. If you just cut down the .desktop files to the bare minimum attributes and edit them by hand, its not so bad. I personally like LXDE because it doesn't really force you to use anything, so it's pretty easy to tweak it exactly as you like.

[Awesomeness]

Personally, I found LXDE a usability nightmare ? mostly because of its broken .desktop file parser.

[markg85]

This is beginning to look quite interesting! Thus far i've not been a user of LXDE-Qt or Razer, but those two merging with a goal of lean and fast is beginning to look very appealing! Certainly something to monitor and see where they end up.

[peppercats]

well this wasn't called when LXDE-qt was announced, or anything