Since I'm using LXDE at the moment, I've been doing a bit of thinking about its future... Here are my thoughts regarding its various parts and aspects. Hopefully they're worth something.
1. LXPanel. First... The battery monitor. It's great, but it needs less ugly. I would personally recommend something along the lines of the XFCE4 battery monitor (NOT the new 4.6 power manager applet) - basically a nice-looking little vertical progress bar, perhaps with an optional icon. When the battery is half empty, the bar is shown as half full; etc. Second, speaking of the battery monitor... Notification, of a sort other than xmessage, could be useful. Not sure how this should be handled though. Is libnotify/notification-daemon light enough, or would it potentially be a pig on old hardware? Also, the battery monitor and LXNM are the only things I can think of right now that need notification.. Maybe it would be better to just let something separate, like Noteo (or xmessage for that matter), handle this. After all, we want to keep things light, modular, and simple. Which brings me to... LXNM. Now, I hope I don't offend anyone - but I just don't get LXNM. It doesn't seem capable of doing anything really useful; it can connect or disconnect from a wired or open wifi network... And that's it. As far as I can tell, no handling of encrypted networks at all, or ability to connect to one of several open networks. Personally, I would recommend just ditching it; wicd can do the job on faster hardware, and wpa_supplicant can handle things on slow machines. Finally... The volume applet. May I be the first to say, please please please do not integrate it with PulseAudio? I'm not really sure how to handle the issue of different sound systems - maybe gstreamer would work, the XFCE folks seem to think so (it seems light enough, and it's not like HDD space is an issue even on Pentium-era machines)... 2. Window managers. In the interest of keeping LXDE modular, I think it would be a good idea to separate it from Openbox a bit. Maybe give lxpanel its own keybinding facilities, or something? I'm not sure, but I think it would be good to be able to use LXDE with fluxbox, pekwm, or even a tiling window manager. 3. Security. Currently, the "suspend" and "hibernate" logout options do not attempt to lock the screen. They really should. Debian gets this issue out of the way by having the screen lock and logout buttons right next to each other on the default LXDE desktop, and it's possible to use keybindings (and xscreensaver's rather long delay before locking) to have a locked screen before suspend/hibernate; but (at least IMHO) those are kind of ugly hacks. It would be better to have a script that checked for various screen lockers and tried to activate one before suspend, or something. (I think I've brought that up before... Sorry if I'm being a nag.) Finally... 4. Slitaz. I cannot stress this enough: CHECK THIS DISTRIBUTION OUT! http://slitaz.org/en/ Yes, it's tiny, only 30 MB. That's cool. But what I'm talking about in this case is the *box applications that come bundled with it. Subox works as an alternative to the somewhat bloaty gksu; burnbox IIRC handles CD burning; Netbox handles networking, and I think a new one for wifi was recently added. So I repeat... TAKE A LOOK AT SLITAZ, especially the *box applications bundled with it. IMHO, it might be a good idea to contact the maintainers of Slitaz and ask them to contribute to LXDE - I think this one distro has done more than any to turn LXDE into a usable desktop environment. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Lxde-list mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxde-list
