I'm very happy about our 0.7 release; only a couple of days in and it's a big success. We've seen increased activity, bug reports and overwhelmingly encouraging feedback on hacker news, reddit and other sources.
When it comes to features and functional polishing, I'm quite confident we're set and we have the right people for it. The most common complaint about LXQt however is graphics, and I tend to agree. I've gotten used to the QtCurve look by now but the truth is it didn't age well. The alternative Qt 4 themes are .. simply awful. Oxygen is okay but unfortunately requires kdelibs, and has no Qt 5 port that I know of. Functionally, there are a couple of points I wanted to raise. First of all, lxqt-notifications and lxqt-panel are heavy users of QSS. I love QSS but it's getting zero love in upstream Qt and I believe we will have to drop it. I think these two apps are actually great candidates to port to QML, which allows a lot more freedom and high level control over their looks. I'm not a big fan of QML myself but it's here and it's not going away, I also think it solves the use cases for our panel and notifications. I also think it'd be pretty well suited for lxqt-runner. The second point is about Qt 5. There's been spiking interest in finishing the port and we're actually almost there. As soon as the desktop fully compiles with Qt 5 I will switch the Arch packages to use that everywhere. I believe that this is something we need to finish first before anything can happen on the graphics side, as Qt 5 has a very different set of widget themes.[1] Now, on to graphics themselves. There's several parts to take care of synchronously: - Qt Widget theme, which controls the majority of the look and feel of Qt apps - Icon and cursor themes - Extra theming for LXQt apps (panel, notifications and runner styling for example) - Wallpapers - Display manager theme On the general look and feel of the desktop, something that was brought up before and that I've thought about myself is a flat look & feel. While it's somewhat trendy it's not universally approved so it would need to stay an option. Still, if it's an easier route it could use some focus. On specifics, the Qt theme itself is very hard to control - very few graphics devs actually know how to deal with that stuff. Icon themes are easier mainly because there's already a large set to choose from. The three other items are easier dealt by graphics people. The problem is of course that we don't really have graphics people right now. So this email is also a call for artists, if anyone is willing to work on this please either reply to this email or contact me directly. Open to thoughts. [1] http://blog.qt.digia.com/blog/2012/10/30/cleaning-up-styles-in-qt5-and-adding-fusion/ J. Leclanche ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Is your legacy SCM system holding you back? Join Perforce May 7 to find out: • 3 signs your SCM is hindering your productivity • Requirements for releasing software faster • Expert tips and advice for migrating your SCM now http://p.sf.net/sfu/perforce _______________________________________________ Lxde-list mailing list Lxde-list@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lxde-list
