[HN Gopher] LXQt 2.0.0
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       LXQt 2.0.0
        
       Author : jrepinc
       Score  : 168 points
       Date   : 2024-04-17 12:52 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lxqt-project.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (lxqt-project.org)
        
       | fullstop wrote:
       | Congrats to the team. I ran this for quite a while and it's a
       | great desktop, especially for older PCs.
        
       | mikae1 wrote:
       | This is really an amazing and underappreciated desktop
       | environment.
       | 
       | If you're looking to save some RAM, this ain't it. Not because
       | LXQt is memory hungry, but because Plasma is so damn efficient
       | these days.
       | 
       | I use Plasma but I can really recommend the LXQt file manager
       | PCManFM-Qt (catchy name ha?). It's a really snappy and no
       | nonsense file manager that feels right at home in Plasma. I
       | prefer it over Dolphin.
        
         | HKH2 wrote:
         | > If you're looking to save some RAM, this ain't it. Not
         | because LXQt is memory hungry, but because Plasma is so damn
         | efficient these days.
         | 
         | I doubt it. Have you got any benchmarks?
        
           | generalizations wrote:
           | Eh. If you want to save RAM & CPU, i3 is where it's at.
        
             | exe34 wrote:
             | xmonad
        
           | Rinzler89 wrote:
           | Can confirm. A fresh boot of plasma eats up around 666MB of
           | RAM. Not much more than the so called lightweight distros,
           | sometimes even less than them, and plasma is a full on DE not
           | a gimped WM.
           | 
           | For benchmarks, just Google them yourself or spin up a VM
           | yourself.
        
             | planede wrote:
             | I don't think a fresh boot is the best benchmark for this.
             | I do use plasma and in my experience memory usage tends to
             | go quite a bit higher with use, even if you close
             | everything. I don't think they have leaks and it's probably
             | just memory some data structures and the allocator hold
             | onto for various reasons.
        
             | bscphil wrote:
             | > around 666MB of RAM
             | 
             | A decade ago, that was a _lot_ of RAM for a desktop
             | environment. In the late  '00s, I remember Ubuntu with
             | Gnome 2 using around ~128 MB of RAM right after boot.
             | 
             | What happened? Most DEs aren't that much more complicated
             | than they were a decade+ ago. Is it the array of supporting
             | libraries (Qt and Gtk) that get loaded into memory? I could
             | see that being a problem since even the "lightweight" DEs
             | like XFCE and LXQt rely on them heavily.
        
               | IshKebab wrote:
               | I haven't checked but I bet a significant part of that is
               | just increased image sizes. Icons and everything are
               | going to be uncompressed in memory and if they're now
               | 256x256 where they used to be 32x32 or whatever, it
               | probably adds up.
               | 
               | There's probably also things like unicode data (ICU is
               | like 20MB), more daemons (WiFi, rendezvous, Bluetooth,
               | etc.), and I think C compilers have generally optimised
               | for speed at the cost of code size over time.
        
               | p4bl0 wrote:
               | Let's not forget that nowadays each pointers takes 8
               | bytes (64 bits) instead of 4 bytes like it was the case
               | on 32 bits systems most of us grew up using, and often
               | have the numbers for in mind. Executables are bigger
               | because of that, and so are their stack and heap
               | (probably not twice as big but probably not too far from
               | that!).
        
               | GrumpySloth wrote:
               | Around 2012 XFCE would use around 448MB. That's more than
               | a decade ago.
        
               | ndiddy wrote:
               | XFCE's resource consumption went up significantly after
               | it got ported from GTK2 to GTK3, the same thing also
               | happened with MATE.
        
             | foresto wrote:
             | > A fresh boot of plasma eats up around 666MB of RAM. Not
             | much more than the so called lightweight distros,
             | 
             | I used Xfce for well over a decade; maybe closer to two. It
             | has long been one of the so-called lightweight
             | environments, and it deserved that reputation when I
             | started with it, but its memory footprint has grown
             | significantly over the years. I don't think it makes a good
             | benchmark for "lightweight" any more.
             | 
             | I'm on Plasma now. It has definitely improved in this
             | department over the same period of time, but it's not what
             | I would consider light. More like middleweight. To be fair,
             | it also seems to be doing more than old Xfce did, with
             | things like QtWebEngine presumably offering GUI
             | functionality of some kind. (Akonadi was another memory
             | eater when I last did a default install, though I think
             | that one is easier to avoid these days.) If wonder if LXQt
             | shuns components like that, or loads them only when needed.
        
           | brnt wrote:
           | Plasma generally scores in the best quartile in Phoronix
           | benches.
        
         | wredue wrote:
         | I used LXQT for a week or so as a daily driver while I was
         | picking envs (eventually landing on i3), and I found LXQT to be
         | buggy and lacking. That was, oh maybe 3 years ago though. So
         | assuming steady development, I hope it's gotten better.
         | 
         | It's also maybe not fair that this was on a dell laptop that
         | didn't play particularly nicely with Linux.
        
         | doubled112 wrote:
         | > PCManFM-Qt (catchy name ha?)
         | 
         | I believe PCMan was the original developer, and FM for "file
         | manager" made sense. Then it was ported to Qt, so add -qt?
         | 
         | That's kind of a mess, isn't it?
        
           | NewJazz wrote:
           | Still, it makes a bit more sense than "Dolphin" or "Nemo",
           | and you'll probably never actually see these names if the
           | desktop file is configured to show a generic name for your
           | desktop environment.
        
           | j1elo wrote:
           | Wait for the release for VR
        
         | kstenerud wrote:
         | > If you're looking to save some RAM, this ain't it. Not
         | because LXQt is memory hungry, but because Plasma is so damn
         | efficient these days.
         | 
         | Not according to these benchmarks:
         | 
         | https://itvision.altervista.org/linux-desktop-environments-s...
         | 
         | https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/07/12/desktop-environmen...
        
           | doubled112 wrote:
           | Typically on lower end machines I disable Akonadi (the PIM
           | data storage service) and Baloo (file indexer). Some systems
           | don't enable them by default.
           | 
           | I'd be interested to know how much of an effect that has.
        
             | SomeoneFromCA wrote:
             | yeah, baloo would crash anyway lol, as it always does.
        
         | krylon wrote:
         | I use MATE, but I prefer PcManFM-Qt over Caja most of the time.
         | It is really good.
        
         | lupusreal wrote:
         | I switched to LXQt because it's power management, e.g. suspend
         | the laptop if the battery goes below whatever percent, actually
         | worked whereas KDE's wasn't and such a basic feature breaking
         | (and causing me to lose work) made me too mad to debug it. I'm
         | sure it's fixed now, but that was only the final straw for me.
         | KDE tries to be too fancy and ends up buggy, whereas LXQt is
         | simple and just werks.
        
         | userabchn wrote:
         | If you like LXQt but would prefer lower RAM usage, then
         | consider LXDE. Even with NetworkManager and PulseAudio, mine
         | only uses 300MB.
        
       | uncletaco wrote:
       | Looks cute.
        
       | NewJazz wrote:
       | I have my grandparents using lxqt (on Debian). I use sway myself,
       | but I knew they needed something familiar to their Windows XP-era
       | customs and without any frills.
       | 
       | The only tech issue I had to debug for them in the last year was
       | when one of the housekeepers pulled a wire while cleaning.
       | 
       | Before Debian LXQt, they were using Lubuntu 18.04 (which was
       | still on LXDE at the time).
        
       | mdaniel wrote:
       | Don't overlook https://github.com/lxqt/qterminal no matter your
       | distro: I used it on Ubuntu because it was the closest I had
       | found (thus far) to iTerm2 on Linux. I still have the lust to
       | teach it about https://github.com/tmux/tmux/wiki/Control-Mode
        
         | bbkane wrote:
         | I'd also recommend https://wezfurlong.org/wezterm/index.html .
         | I switched to it from iTerm2 for the reasons in
         | https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/tree/master/wezterm#iterm...
         | (primarily a simpler Lua config to reason about and version
         | control)
        
       | atan2 wrote:
       | I have been running LXQt for years. A really great desktop
       | environment!
        
       | cies wrote:
       | With software bloat being rampant, this is a medicine.
       | 
       | Qt keeps the overhead down enormously compared to GTK-based, or
       | even (but to a lesser extend) KDE-based (which itself is Qt-
       | based).
       | 
       | With good Wayland support.
       | 
       | I think this is replacing XFCE as goto low resource desktop on
       | Linux.
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | Qt could be much larger if the licensing terms were not 5d chess
       | for over a decade.
        
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       (page generated 2024-04-17 23:01 UTC)