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Reading behind the link made me learn about Lumina desktop. I'm curious to why it is not making use of the LxQt effort? They seem to be pretty close in goals...

by cies 10y ago

kitsunesoba 10y ago
If I'm not mistaken one of the big goals of Lumina is to produce a desktop with its roots in BSD, since most (if not all) DEs currently in development got their start on Linux. I imagine the idea is to develop Lumina as part of a single-piece OS, BSD-style, as opposed to the Linux model where everything is developed independently and then glued together to form a distro.
- int_19h 10y ago
  It still feels like it'd make more sense to at least fork something existing (or better yet, find a desktop that doesn't mind BSD-specific conditional code inclusion). I mean, the one-base-system mentality doesn't preclude the BSDs from using gcc and/or Clang - even though they weren't developed for BSD specifically, they are clearly the best available choice. I wonder why not Xfce, specifically. Of all the DEs out there, it seems most complete in a sense of being an actual DE, with the usual configurability and stock apps that one would expect (a great file manager, for one). But at the same time, it's not the mammoth that Gnome and KDE are, gets out of the way easily enough, and doesn't demand that applications are aware of its existence beyond following XDG specs.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Not sure, but i think XFCE relies on a fair bit of Gnome plumbing, and that pluming in turn is becoming increasingly systemd-centric. Not even sure how well GTK3 plays with BSDs, and XFCE will move to using GTK3 "soon".
    - int_19h 10y ago
      I don't think that's the case, at least not anymore. I'm running Xfce on two systems, one of which is Gentoo (in the default OpenRC configuration, no systemd), and the other is FreeBSD. Neither has Gnome installed - just recently I had to actually install gconf to do something, as a matter of fact, and was surprised that it wasn't there - but they handle Xfce just fine. I believe it used Gnome settings daemon at some point, but it has its own these days.
- gribbly 10y ago
  >I imagine the idea is to develop Lumina as part of a single-piece OS That makes no sense to me, given that it runs on Linux as well as BSD. From what I've read it relies on Qt, Fluxbox, XScreensaver etc, which are hardly BSD based components. >as opposed to the Linux model where everything is developed independently and then glued together to form a distro. What's the difference here ? Lumina is developed independently, the components Lumina builds upon are developed independently of Lumina, it is then glued together with PC-BSD into TrueOS.
- fnj 10y ago
  No, Nothing about Lumina ties it to BSD. On the contrary; it's fundamentally easily portable to any OS. It runs just fine on Arch linux. The "idea" was to generate a basic DE that is not mired into any lame dependencies such as systemd.
hjdstf786 10y ago
>I'm curious to why it is not making use of the LxQt effort? I would guess the primary reason is licensing. The other is a motivation to integrate with FreeBD/TrueOS specific things like ZFS and their administration tools.
scrollaway 10y ago
Development on LXQt's been rough lately. I really wish the Lumina guys would have contacted us at some point, reached out to us. There is a very big lack of manpower, lack of designers, lack of general availability from sysadmins or developers competent at UX. It saddens me greatly. I used to take care of releases, outreach and UX but focusing on my company means I don't have the time to do that anymore. Despite taking great care to reduce the bus factor as much as possible, right now, LXQt is stuck without a release because there's nobody that both cares about the project and has the time and skills to do this kind of stuff. This is how the Linux desktop dies. A couple of "big" players doing their own thing and a plethora of small players never trying to partner up with similar projects. LXQt was successful for a long time because it was two small projects that merged into a larger one, but people move on and the momentum gets lost.
- optforfon 10y ago
  As far as I know Lumina is a one man project. I remember listening to a podcast with him. It sounded very much like a guy started messing around and trying stuff out and ended up with Lumina. Kinda like Hammer2 is also mostly a one man project. That's why it's pretty slow moving. Sorry about LxQt. Wish I had some Qt experience to help out
- digi_owl 10y ago
  > A couple of "big" players doing their own thing So much for Freedesktop standardization...
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    FDO is a failed project. It got us a few good things, but now it's a joke. Nobody cares about or reads the mailing list, nobody takes the various requests in it seriously, blah... I'm pretty upset about it.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  The problem with GNU/Linux is that they just replaced the UNIX wars with Linux wars. For a long time, starting with Slackware 2.0 and for around 10 years, I wanted to use fully use GNU/Linux and used most of the distributions until eventually settling on Ubuntu. Which I only use on a travel netbook anyway. As someone that is focused on UX and the whole desktop stack, never found a UNIX that cared about the user desktop experience. Compared to Atari, Amiga, BeOS or even Windows. NextSTEP was probably the closest to it, but even its UNIX underpinnings were more a side effect to speed up its development and make it easy to port software than anything else. So my daily OSes have become Windows, OS X and Android. The fact that Apple and Google have a UNIX kernel is totally irrelevant for the programming languages I make use of.

Reading behind the link made me learn about Lumina desktop. I'm curious to why it is not making use of the LxQt effort? They seem to be pretty close in goals...

by cies 10y ago

Reading behind the link made me learn about Lumina desktop. I'm curious to why it is not making use of the LxQt effort? They seem to be pretty close in goals...

kitsunesoba 10y ago

If I'm not mistaken one of the big goals of Lumina is to produce a desktop with its roots in BSD, since most (if not all) DEs currently in development got their start on Linux. I imagine the idea is to develop Lumina as part of a single-piece OS, BSD-style, as opposed to the Linux model where everything is developed independently and then glued together to form a distro.

int_19h 10y ago
It still feels like it'd make more sense to at least fork something existing (or better yet, find a desktop that doesn't mind BSD-specific conditional code inclusion). I mean, the one-base-system mentality doesn't preclude the BSDs from using gcc and/or Clang - even though they weren't developed for BSD specifically, they are clearly the best available choice. I wonder why not Xfce, specifically. Of all the DEs out there, it seems most complete in a sense of being an actual DE, with the usual configurability and stock apps that one would expect (a great file manager, for one). But at the same time, it's not the mammoth that Gnome and KDE are, gets out of the way easily enough, and doesn't demand that applications are aware of its existence beyond following XDG specs.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Not sure, but i think XFCE relies on a fair bit of Gnome plumbing, and that pluming in turn is becoming increasingly systemd-centric. Not even sure how well GTK3 plays with BSDs, and XFCE will move to using GTK3 "soon".
  - int_19h 10y ago
    I don't think that's the case, at least not anymore. I'm running Xfce on two systems, one of which is Gentoo (in the default OpenRC configuration, no systemd), and the other is FreeBSD. Neither has Gnome installed - just recently I had to actually install gconf to do something, as a matter of fact, and was surprised that it wasn't there - but they handle Xfce just fine. I believe it used Gnome settings daemon at some point, but it has its own these days.
gribbly 10y ago
>I imagine the idea is to develop Lumina as part of a single-piece OS That makes no sense to me, given that it runs on Linux as well as BSD. From what I've read it relies on Qt, Fluxbox, XScreensaver etc, which are hardly BSD based components. >as opposed to the Linux model where everything is developed independently and then glued together to form a distro. What's the difference here ? Lumina is developed independently, the components Lumina builds upon are developed independently of Lumina, it is then glued together with PC-BSD into TrueOS.
fnj 10y ago
No, Nothing about Lumina ties it to BSD. On the contrary; it's fundamentally easily portable to any OS. It runs just fine on Arch linux. The "idea" was to generate a basic DE that is not mired into any lame dependencies such as systemd.

hjdstf786 10y ago

>I'm curious to why it is not making use of the LxQt effort? I would guess the primary reason is licensing. The other is a motivation to integrate with FreeBD/TrueOS specific things like ZFS and their administration tools.

scrollaway 10y ago

Development on LXQt's been rough lately. I really wish the Lumina guys would have contacted us at some point, reached out to us. There is a very big lack of manpower, lack of designers, lack of general availability from sysadmins or developers competent at UX. It saddens me greatly. I used to take care of releases, outreach and UX but focusing on my company means I don't have the time to do that anymore. Despite taking great care to reduce the bus factor as much as possible, right now, LXQt is stuck without a release because there's nobody that both cares about the project and has the time and skills to do this kind of stuff. This is how the Linux desktop dies. A couple of "big" players doing their own thing and a plethora of small players never trying to partner up with similar projects. LXQt was successful for a long time because it was two small projects that merged into a larger one, but people move on and the momentum gets lost.

optforfon 10y ago
As far as I know Lumina is a one man project. I remember listening to a podcast with him. It sounded very much like a guy started messing around and trying stuff out and ended up with Lumina. Kinda like Hammer2 is also mostly a one man project. That's why it's pretty slow moving. Sorry about LxQt. Wish I had some Qt experience to help out
digi_owl 10y ago
> A couple of "big" players doing their own thing So much for Freedesktop standardization...
- scrollaway 10y ago
  FDO is a failed project. It got us a few good things, but now it's a joke. Nobody cares about or reads the mailing list, nobody takes the various requests in it seriously, blah... I'm pretty upset about it.
pjmlp 10y ago
The problem with GNU/Linux is that they just replaced the UNIX wars with Linux wars. For a long time, starting with Slackware 2.0 and for around 10 years, I wanted to use fully use GNU/Linux and used most of the distributions until eventually settling on Ubuntu. Which I only use on a travel netbook anyway. As someone that is focused on UX and the whole desktop stack, never found a UNIX that cared about the user desktop experience. Compared to Atari, Amiga, BeOS or even Windows. NextSTEP was probably the closest to it, but even its UNIX underpinnings were more a side effect to speed up its development and make it easy to port software than anything else. So my daily OSes have become Windows, OS X and Android. The fact that Apple and Google have a UNIX kernel is totally irrelevant for the programming languages I make use of.