On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 4:30 AM, Andrej N. Gritsenko <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello! > > PCMan have written on Tuesday, 26 March, at 10:42: >>Hello world, >>I just released PCManFM Qt file manager 0.1.0. >>The tarball is available for download here. > > I never looked into razor-qt before and I wasn't aware such DE even > exists but now that I looked into its site I've found out some conceptual > similarities with LXDE. And I've got some crazy idea. Since libfm/pcmanfm > has Qt port already and LXDE as whole has too few active developers, it > might be reasonable to join projects (razor-qt and LXDE), i.e. port to Qt > rest of LXDE components so LXDE will be based on Qt instead of GTK and > razor-qt will get few missing applications as well. It's a crazy idea, I > know, and may be even silly one, I just got that thought and decided to > write it out loud. :) > I never did comparizon on resourses consumption between pcmanfm GTK > and Qt versions though, it should be done somehow sometime. And if Qt is > more lightweight than GTK then... you know. :) > The only problem is that GTK is C but Qt is C++... > > Cheers! > Andriy.
Thank you guys very much for the proposal. It's not crazy at all. The proposal is very practical. Actually, it's also what I'm thinking about now. As the lead developer and founder of a some what famous DE, it's really hard for me to say this. Even I personally found that using Qt is much more productive and I already tested razor-qt for a while, I felt that we should not abandon our LXDE users/supporters. Politically, we belongs to the Gtk+ camp and moving toward Qt will make some supporters disappointed. Technically, porting to Qt is much easier than it looks like. It only took me 1 - 2 months to port 90% of the functionality of pcmanfm to Qt. So porting all other LXDE components to Qt is applicable and practical. I've been evaluating razor-qt for months. I followed up the project regularly and joined their mailing list. It has very similar goals with us and its development is really rapid. After months it's nearly complete now and contains even much more stuff than us. The infrastructure and library APIs are also well designed. So personally I like razor-qt very much and admire their work. Resource usage is a little more than ours, but that's understandable because it has more features. Free software is all about choice, but too many choices is not always good. Diversity is nice, but having duplicated work with the only differences in GUI toolkits is non-sense. This only creates unnecessary divergence and waste precious man power. Since we have the same goals, merging the effort is reasonable. Though the future of Qt is uncertain (will Digia sell it someday?), it still has many supporters and ubuntu is moving toward Qt. Currently, Gnome 3 seems to be the only user of gtk+3. XFCE2 is using gtk2 and they're also suffering from the painful porting. Gtk2 seems to be lighter than Qt in some cases, but it's no longer true for gtk3. Besides, it's KDE that's bloat, not Qt. Compared with gtk+, Qt contains much more than just GUI widgets. It also offers xml parsers, database supports, network stuff, and even webkit support. With gtk+, you need to install many other libraries for these but with Qt they're built-in. That explains the bigger library size. So it's not really bloat. To sum up, if our developers and users are willing to joint the effort and help razor-qt instead of mirrors what they have with gtk+, I'm not against the idea. Instead of having two incomplete DEs, at least we can have a really good one. For those who get used to gtk+, learning C++ and Qt is much easier than learning GObject. I started porting pcmanfm to Qt immediately after reading the Qt tutorial and "hello world". Maybe a vote is needed for this issue? Comments are wanted, please. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_apr _______________________________________________ Lxde-list mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxde-list
