Hello, first of all I would like to say that I know almost nothing about LXDE since I never really used it. However I can provide you with the following information: On Tue, 6 Sep 2016 22:00:42 +0200 Richard Brown <RBrownCCB@opensuse.org> wrote:
On 6 September 2016 at 20:51, listreader <suselist@cableone.net> wrote:
On Tue, 6 Sep 2016 12:48:03 +0200 (CEST) Roger Price <roger@rogerprice.org> wrote:
I am trying to install 42.2 Beta using the NET install CD, but when I get to "Desktop Selection", I cannot find LXDE as included in previous releases. Is openSUSE abandoning LXDE? [...] The short answer is "openSUSE is not abandoning LXDE, we will do all we can to take care of our existing LXDE users"
But that is only half of the story
The reality is that LXDE is effectively in a state of abandonment from it's upstream. No development is happening on it any more. No development ever will. Our own openSUSE LXDE maintainer has not been seen or heard of for in 6 years, but it's not like they've had any work to do lately anyway, so maybe they're just lurking :)
Personally I know that one of the maintainers (the main one?) has too few free time on his hands to put it in the project. I am involved with LXQt on both upstream and openSUSE. Since historically the LXQt development took place in X11:LXDE I am still a maintainer in that project, I try to take care of submit requests, make the project build etc but am not really involved with LXDE.
And so, having it offered in the installer is frankly a stupid idea - we want to take care of our existing LXDE users, we want to ensure Leap 42.x upgrades are as smooth as possible for them, but encouraging new Leap installs to LXDE would be irresponsible for us given the support status of the software.
LXQt is the declared future of LXDE but there are lots of unanswered questions
Recently I tried to add some information about this to the openSUSE wiki[1]. At some point the LXDE project seemed like dead and people from the LXDE and razor-qt and fresh LXQt team were working on LXQt. They announced that LXQt would be the successor of LXDE. Later on some of the developers (and new ones?) revived LXDE and still try to polish it to this day. In their git repos[2] one can see that they continue to work on it but do not make major changes. The development team is small an generally they consider their desktop as 'mature'. The LXQt 'about page' still states that LXQt is the successor of LXDE. This and the fact that the LXDE website (and wiki) are quite outdated contribute to the impression that there is not development happening on it. About the first part we try to change the 'about page' [4].
Chief among them "does it work?", quickly followed by "does it work as a drop in replacement for LXDE users?"
My personal research suggests the latter is normally an answer of 'It wasn't working but it's starting to now', the former is normally answered by "no, it's a different DE"
It works fairly well, its far from perfect yet. Certainly its not as mature as LXDE now :-) The next release (0.11) was planned to happen some weeks ago but didn't happen yet, I try to work with upstream to make it happen rather sooner than later so we can have it in Leap 42.2. In my opinion the new release is a nice step forward.
We do have LXQt in both Leap and Tumbleweed, but given it's relative immaturity and almost certainly lacking feature set, I think it's the right thing to not include it on the installer at this time
I would suggest the same.
My advice to the ambitious among you would be to do what you can to install and test LXQt, get it polished up, get it as fully functional as we expect from a top tier openSUSE DE (easy to install, easy to co-exist, easy to patch, easy for contributors to maintain, all that stuff), and then hopefully by the time we're developing Leap 43.0 we can discuss whether or not it makes sense to put LXQt back in the installer as a clear desktop choice rather than just as a pattern in the software tooling.
I can only agree to this :-) The 0.11 release of LXQt will be a big step forward. But still its far from feature complete or perfectly fitting together. People who would like to try it out can use the our git packages. A few weeks ago I created the X11:LXQt:git [3] project which builds always latest git. We use GitHub webhooks to trigger OBS to always build new packages upon commits to the upstream master branches. For those who would like to help with developing and testing the [1] wiki has some information (but clearly not enough). Feel also free to contact me directly. I hope this helps a little. 1: https://en.opensuse.org/LXQT 2: http://git.lxde.org/gitweb/ 3: https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/X11:LXQt:git 4: https://github.com/lxde/lxde.github.io/issues/24 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org