18 ms·

Lubuntu is taking a new direction

271 points by niutech 8y ago

mistrial9 8y ago
I am quite concerned that network security is pushing very usable software and hardware to the junkyard. Is it possible that for a variety of reasons, it is better to have something reliable and stable, than to throw out working software because of intractable browser and network security problems ?
- amaccuish 8y ago
  sorry where was that bit in the article?
- twblalock 8y ago
  It's better to throw out insecure software. Computers with security problems get hacked and end up in botnets.
- frio 8y ago
  Most everything we do with computers in the modern world uses the network. If software is insecure -- is it really usable? Is it really reliable? I'd pretty strongly argue that the answer to both questions is no :).
megaman22 8y ago
It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more than capable of everything I throw at it. The upgrade cycle is essentially dead. That being said, I'm not clear on what the real difference between Lubuntu and Kubuntu will be now.
- EpicEng 8y ago
  >It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more than capable of everything I throw at it You must not throw much at it
  - hug 8y ago
    I cannot think of a single AAA title in recent memory that causes my i7 2600k -- an 8 year old CPU -- to struggle. It can play absolutely every single modern game, with the only component upgrade in its 8 year life being the GPU.
    - sincerely 8y ago
      I'm not a huge gamer anymore but...isn't the main bottleneck for running AAA gaming at high settings the GPU?
      - SamReidHughes 8y ago
        It can be the CPU. But since four cores is the best everybody has, games don't push that.
      - nilkn 8y ago
        Generally yes, although there are certain games that an old CPU would definitely choke on. It’s a bit disingenuous to say the upgrade cycle is dead and then to spend more money on upgrading the GPU than the total value of everything else combined.
    - EpicEng 8y ago
      >I cannot think of a single AAA title in recent memory that causes my i7 2600k -- an 8 year old CPU -- to struggle I cannot think of any modern, graphically demanding game which is bottlenecked by the CPU. I imagine you are harming your GPU performance to some degree with such an old CPU though. Not sure I buy what you're saying here. What settings are you using?
      - hug 8y ago
        My point, of course, is that the only thing you’re going to measure a gaming rig by is gaming, which has very little to do with the age (or speed) of any component other than the GPU. Do you suspect, though, that the standard home user (or user of a repurposed old machine with Lubuntu on it, maybe) is going to be pushing those other components harder than a modern AAA game? Yeah, me neither. As an aside to answer your question:, I can run pretty much any game on its highest settings just fine with this machine: which is a gtx1070, 2600k, and 16gb of RAM driving a 120hz 1080p display. It was originally built with two HD5990s in crossfire.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  KDE and LXQt are radically different, even though they use the same underlying framework. In a way, it'll be the same difference as XFCE vs. GNOME.
  - grawprog 8y ago
    I must admit these days i'm really preferring Qt over GTK. It's come a long way since I started using Linux. I remember looking at LXQt back when it was first released and found it fairly interesting but nowhere near developed enough for daily use. I always liked XFCE but found it lacking in customization and kind of buggy at the time I used it. Though it did keep my laptop going after a hardrivr failure running partitioned across 4 USB drives until I got a new one. It's cool to see LXQt in a state where lubuntu is adopting it as it's primary environment.
- bscphil 8y ago
  Even good quality laptop hardware is lasting. I'm using a laptop that's about 8 years old as my daily driver, and it can more than handle everything I need it to do - and that includes compiling software regularly. We've reached a great time for computers because pretty much any device you can buy (even used) can do all the stuff most people need to do. The primary advantage of newer gear is just reduced power requirements.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    Hopefully this will be the next big battleground in the world of hardware. I'd love a laptop that could go days between charges.
- shmerl 8y ago
  > It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more than capable of everything I throw at it. The upgrade cycle is essentially dead. Not really for GPUs though. AMD progressed a lot and all the new features are landing in amdgpu, not in radeon. That's important especially for Vulkan support. Older GPUs are locked out of that completely. CPU progress is less rapid, but something like Ryzen is quite a breakthrough.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  > The upgrade cycle is essentially dead. It's terrible that we can't count on computers getting twice as fast every year any more. I guess it couldn't last for ever...
  - andrewmcwatters 8y ago
    Nah, nah, it's about damn time software engineers start giving a shit about performance again.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      ...because we've already got all the computing power we'll ever need? You think software developers not caring about performance is why we can't quickly simulate weather systems or protein folding or do large-scale ML?
      - megaman22 8y ago
        I'd settle for text editors that don't lock up when I type an open paren. Or use entire sticks of RAM at rest.
        ReverseCold 8y ago
        > text editors that don't lock up when I type an open paren This miiiiight be just you. Even sublime text (forget vim or another cli editor) runs fine on ancient hardware. What type of files are you editing? > Or use entire sticks of RAM at rest. I'd hope my text editors would use as much ram as it needs in order to give me the smoothest experience. If possible, that means storing the whole file in RAM (up to a set limit).
        artursapek 8y ago
        Stop using editors written in Javascript by overpaid new-grads
        sokoloff 8y ago
        Some here are old enough to remember "emacs: eight megabytes and constantly swapping", back when a stick of RAM could have been 8 Megabytes...
ArtWomb 8y ago
Writing this comment on a 4th gen Core-i5 laptop running Lubuntu booted into RAM. UX is just incredibly responsive. Up since Jun 1. And would probably run forever ;) But into the future I am very interested in restoring older laptops with ChromeOS / Neverware. Especially if they meet the requirements for running the Android / Linux container and studio. By mid-2020's chromebooks could account for 5% of global pc market share.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  I hadn't heard of Neverware before, so thanks for that. It looks like it's the Chromebook OS, does it force you to use the Google apps? Basically, is it usable without a Google account?
  - remir 8y ago
    As far as I know, except for a guest account, there's no local account on Neverware, so you'll need a Google account to use it, which is unfortunate.
- jcastro 8y ago
  I'm doing this with neverware now, they just landed crostini in the dev release, but they've natively supported flatpak and docker for a while now. It's good stuff!
- untog 8y ago
  Agreed on Neverware. It's an absolute dream to hand over an old machine with Neverware installed to a relative with modest tech needs. It's very fast, and I don't get tech support calls any more. Win-win.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  That doesn't seem particularly old to me? I'm running the latest Fedora with KDE on a "4th gen Core-i5 laptop" and it's more than capable.
chx 8y ago
One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little bit less than ten years old but still older than Sandy Bridge. Someone did the math and it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs in multithread performance https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#post-1043712895 https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#... Obviousy since we are talking of 8 new cores matching 12 old cores the single thread performance will be 50% faster. Wait, what? 50% faster? Is that all? I mean, many tasks are still single threaded and from 2010 to 2018 we have grown 50% in single thread and 100% in multithread? If things were going the "old way" then in 8 years would've seen a 2^(8/1.5) -- well over thirty times speedup (Moore's law as stated by David House who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months). You can see some of that http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm here. No wonder there's no point focusing on old CPUs any more.
- mustaflex 8y ago
  I have a desktop with an intel 3570k bought in 2012, I wanted to build a new gaming desktop with a ryzen 2700x. The ryzen is only 20% better in single threaded performance. I could easily overclock my cpu to close further the gap. Just need to upgrade my gpu and I'm good for a few more years. These cpus have aged quiet well.
  - Nition 8y ago
    I recently replaced my main desktop PC after nine years and the new CPU benchmarks at only about twice the performance. Double the performance isn't too bad obviously, but that's about the same timespan as between the 486 and the Pentium III.
    - _arvin 8y ago
      I'm right there with you guys. I made my desktop in 2014 with a Haswell i5-4670K @ 3.4GHz. Overclocked it to 4.3GHz, and I still don't have a reason to upgrade. I really want a Ryzen 2700X also but staying patient. Newer and better hardware will keep coming out so I'm in no rush. (but my next CPU will definitely be AMD) My current thing right now is compiling the Linux kernel exactly catered to my Haswell machine, and using the latest gcc with "-march=native -O2" optimizations. It might seem minor, but man if she ain't screaming right now. I should mention I have an AMD RX 480 graphics card also. So I'm up-to-date in that world and enjoying the best of team red and blue right now. New drivers, software, kernels, and optimizations keep coming out that make my current hardware faster. But then came Spectre and Meltdown lol.
antoineMoPa 8y ago
I always loved Qt as a developer and hated it as a user. Every app/desktop environment written in it seem buggy and expensive on RAM. On the other side, I always loved GTK apps and their feel/design, but never got to make anything big myself in GTK. There are other points to this debate than RAM/Resources: Looks and feel, philosophy, feature bloatedness, etc.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Given the endless messages that each Gtk+ based application vomits into stdout/stderr, I wouldn't say they are any better.
  - antoineMoPa 8y ago
    The average user does not start applications from a terminal.
    - JasonFruit 8y ago
      Not even the average Linux user? I don't have any more data than you do, but I question that.
      - antoineMoPa 8y ago
        I mean, we have application menus for that.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Not seeing the messages does not magically fix quality issues.
- mrob 8y ago
  I used to love GTK apps, but GTK3 has become almost unusable. I used XFCE for years, but now it's switched to GTK3 I've had to abandon it for LXDE (GTK2 version). Even something as simple as the XFCE text editor (Mousepad) now has pointless animations that you can't turn off and it constantly flickers unless you turn on compositing, which is useless latency increasing bloat. Everything about GTK3 feels like it was designed by somebody who'd rather be working on mobile apps. There's frequent animations deliberately wasting my time and distracting me, and excessive whitespace deliberately wasting my pixels. Maybe it's fixable with the complicated and unstable CSS based theming, but instead of fighting the system it would be easier to switch to Qt based apps. Qt at least appears to be designed for experienced users on desktops/laptops, not morons on phones.
manaskarekar 8y ago
I don't want to come across as ungrateful but I'm not very happy about this. I haven't looked into the reasons for this change but I'm sure there are some compelling ones to make such a big change. LXDE based Lubuntu struck the perfect balance (for me) between: - Being minimal and lightweight - but works out of the box with enough batteries included - tons of community resources due to being a ~buntu - very, very customizable (I love my undecorated windows and no bullshit shortcuts/decorations etc) - sane user experience, without any unnecessary bloat - LTS support (albeit shorter than other ~buntu releases). Yes, I can achieve these things some other way, but Lubuntu hit this sweet spot out of the box with minimal tweaking. Maybe LXQt will be great, may be not, but at this point it reminds me of Ubuntu 10.10 which, IMHO, was as refined as Ubuntu (or any linux distro at the time) could be, and then they just decided to throw all that maturity and refinement away and start from scratch. I truly hope LXQt based Lubuntu succeeds, but it's a sad day to me.
- devxpy 8y ago
  Ubuntu 10.10, huh. I'm not old enough to have experienced that, but I can say that we have the same thing happening with 16.04 They had it almost perfect and decided to throw it all out. History does repeat itself...
  - MetaDark 8y ago
    Not old enough? Well this makes me feel old even though I'm not. I'm 22 and my first version of Ubuntu was 8.04.
    - woolvalley 8y ago
      I'm guessing they got into using linux later in life. Not all of us messed with linux when we were 12 ;)
      - hobs 8y ago
        Still made me feel a billion years old as I am pretty sure I had quite a few Warty Warthog cds around at one point.
peatmoss 8y ago
As an exercise, I threw OpenBSD and GNUStep on a machine the other day. I wouldn’t say GNUStep provides the best Free/Open desktop, but I want to believe that it could. The thing is, many of the modern Linux desktops seem to be heavily wedded to a lot of dconf and systemd infrastructure. OpenBSD has managed to build analogs for enough of the heavily Linux-centric infrastructure that Gnome 3 depends on, but man it’s clear that Gnome 3 was written with Linux and only Linux in mind. I didn’t see KDE in the OpenBSD ports when I looked, and I suspect it too is because KDE has become wedded to Linux-only services. XFCE remains the most portable full-featured Desktop environment and runs well on OpenBSD. But GNUStep... GNUStep is my biggest regret. GNUStep isn’t entirely comparable to XFCE, because GNUStep isn’t a desktop. It’s more like all GTK plus dconf plus all the desktop services required for interaction between GUI apps plus a uniform display layer. In short, GNUStep is more or less like Cocoa from macOS. Add GWorkspace, and you have a solid reimplementation of macOS’s Finder. I wish GNUStep had caught on or that someone would inject new life into it. There are apps that compile on both GNUstep and macOS. For whatever reason macOS seems to attract better desktop apps—both Free and commercial. Had GNUStep and not KDE or Gnome become the defacto *Nix desktop, I imagine people would be writing macOS apps for free on Linux, and macOS users would be recompiling apps to run on Linux... and not just Linux, but all the platforms that GNUStep supports, like OpenBSD and Windows. EDIT: Oh yeah, and why I thought to write this, is because GTK vs QT both feel like lower potential toolkits. And GNUStep also feels very lightweight and portable.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  > I didn’t see KDE in the OpenBSD ports when I looked, and I suspect it too is because KDE has become wedded to Linux-only services. I doubt this is the issue. KDE Plasma 5 seemed okay on FreeBSD when I tried it recently, although I don't have any recent KDE+Linux experience to compare it with. More likely there just hasn't been enough developer interest to get it properly ported to OpenBSD. Edit: To get more at your actual point, I've had similar feelings about GNUStep, but when I dug into it I felt like there was just too much of a mismatch with the rest of the FOSS GUI ecosystem. Maybe I'd be a die-hard devotee if I'd tried it back in the '90s as my first thing after fvwm-configured-to-look-like-mwm.
rocky1138 8y ago
This makes sense for things like x86, but what about ARM stuff? It tends to be low power in both wattage and speed, perfect for Lubuntu. I'd love to see even more effort on things like the Pinebook.
apatters 8y ago
> our main focus is shifting from (providing a distribution for old hardware) to a (functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer.) I like Lubuntu and often use it for low powered devices and sometimes devices that aren't so low powered. This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus. Here's how you should have said it: We are focusing our resources on developing a fast, clean, functional distribution for devices manufactured in the last ten years. Then you can go on to explain the rationale (which is all quite sensible, if you don't want to support hardware that's 15-20 years old, you don't have to, it's a pretty niche market anyway).
- asadjb 8y ago
  I have never used Lubuntu other than trying it out a few times, so this is just going off of the content in the article. > This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus To me, it seems that they ran the numbers (kudos to them for taking an empirical approach) and figured out that their original USP was now no longer unique enough, and they need to do something different to stay in the game. But this article makes it seem like they haven't figured out what that something different is. They list a number of things they are going to provide, including: - leverage modern, Qt-based technologies and programs to give users a functional yet modular experience - Lubuntu will continue to be a transparent and open distribution - create and maintain complete documentation And a few others. But none of these seem to be different enough from the other great choices available as Ubuntu flavors. That's just my read on the article anyway.
  - Animats 8y ago
    "Modern, Qt-based technologies?" Qt is 27 years old. It came out for Windows 3.1.
    - bmn__ 8y ago
      It did not stop improving since then. "Modern" describes the current status, not when it came out initially.
zmix 8y ago
PR blurb, telling us, that Lubuntu is going to die within the next two years, or so.
- pseudonym2 8y ago
  You're downvoted a lot because you didn't substantiate your claim, but I assume many people, myself included, agree with the sentiment. Up until now Lubuntu had a clear goal: Create a usable Ubuntu-compatible distribution that runs on old hardware. Now the goals are so vague and subjective that they lead to nowhere. Sure, this won't matter in the short term, but sooner or later the project will get completely derailed because of different interpretations of this dumb statement. They can still make a good lightweight OS that runs on 10 year old hardware. There's no reason to change the goal. Sure, it's no longer a massive challenge, but it doesn't have to be. If the developers want to try new things they can fork it.
hyperpallium 8y ago
Are low-end phones now on par with these 10 year old systems? It's difficult to find a phone with less than 1 GB RAM. And although ARM CPUs are much less powerful than x86 with the same clock, 1 GHz also seems a mininum.
- riquito 8y ago
  Nevermind arm/Intel, consider that the Intel processor of a notebook is way less powerful than its desktop counterpart
axaxs 8y ago
I don't understand the rationale behind a separate group/committee/website/idea for the same distro with different defaults. I worked with the Antergos team, a team of 4 people, to write a distro that let you pick and choose everything, from DE to browsers. While I've mainly faded away they are still hard at it. In short, if we can support nearly every DE with 4 volunteers, what are these *buntus spending their resources on?
- xorcist 8y ago
  The boring answer is probably "because defaults matter". But you are of course right that it would be less work for all people involved if these were instead Debian Derivatives or Fedora Spins where the useful infrastructure, developer processes etc. are already in place. I guess it all comes down to branding, and the fact that starting over is easier right at the beginning.
- michaelmrose 8y ago
  Antergos most emphatically isn't a distro it's just an installer for arch Linux and quite frankly a poorly designed one that does not always actually work. After the installer runs if it actually works you aren't left with something much different from a normal arch installation. The actual distro developers have a lot of work to do as far as assembling a wide range of components and often writing their own like package management systems and recipes for building thousands of packages. Its unsurprising that people writing 0.1% of distro badly doesn't require much work.
  - axaxs 8y ago
    Sorry, I don't follow. Your second paragraph is rather accurate. That said, I don't see how that's different from the various flavors of Ubuntu. I would consider Lubuntu an Ubuntu installer...
  - Klover 8y ago
    Well that’s mean. But I have to agree that it doesn’t actually work 99% of the time for me. It certainly is easier to install arch than it is trying to debug cnchi. Arch requires so much typing, but at least the installation is reliable.
known 8y ago
I'm a Lubuntu user; I'll shift to https://clearlinux.org https://clearlinux.org
mastrsushi 8y ago
I don't know if QT is part of the reason what makes KDE so sluggish, but if thats the case, Lubuntu switching to LXQT might have a lot to do with this challenge. If that's the case, I really have no idea why they're so hell bent on the transition from GTK. If love for them to migrate to JWM, but last time I checked the L in Lubuntu is for LXDE. Is there really any benefit in adopting QT or are they just following what they see as the "forward" direction. LXDE doesn't have to look glossy, skeumorphic, and outdated. A skin is superficial, I would do anything to avoid QTumor.
- youwishboye 8y ago
  > I don't know if QT is part of the reason what makes KDE so sluggish What are you talking about mate? Have you tried KDE in the last 3 years?
- genghizkhan 8y ago
  As far as I've seen, it's not. I used razor-qt when it was still an independent project and I pretty much fell in love with the idea of it. Gnome 3 was being a PITA (I remember throwing things when my artfully crafted css broke with an upgrade) and KDE hadn't crossed over into version 5. I'd tried out XFCE at that point. It didn't excite me because I didn't want to get stuck with GTK 2. I just downloaded razor-qt and realised that with a bit of spit, shine and polish, this had the potential to become what LXDE was to Gnome. I'm pretty happy about LXQT emerging from the LXDE/razor-qt merger. Anyway, back to your question. razor-qt was pretty snappy on my machine, leading me to conclude that KDE was slow because it was KDE. Akonadi, slow animations, buggy widgets, you name it. I haven't tried KDE since then (this was back in 2012 or so), but I've heard that the latest incarnations are pretty snappy and light. Even if they aren't, I highly doubt LXQT will have any problems with lag.
- simion314 8y ago
  Qt works on embedded systems so it is an optimized toolkit, if a Qt app feels slow then most of the time the fault is with the app developer.
- slezyr 8y ago
  > I really have no idea why they're so hell bent on the transition from GTK Because otherwise they have to develop it? > A skin is superficial, I would do anything to avoid QTumor. Do me a favour.
dooyogi 8y ago
Besides running on old hardware, the main benefit of distros like Lubuntu and Xubuntu is that they run well in VirtualBox without reliable GPU support. Ubuntu with Gnome 3 is almost unusable in VirtualBox.
- mrweasel 8y ago
  When you see people recommend new Linux users that they could try Ubuntu in VirtualBox, to get familier with it, I often wonder what kind of impression they walk away with. An modern Linux distribution in a vm, running on your laptop typically isn't all that great an experience.
- fbnlsr 8y ago
  Thanks for that comment. I've tried using Ubuntu inside VirtualBox on my brand new i7-8700 / 16 GB RAM computer and it's far from being smooth. I'll give Xubuntu a try.
- crtasm 8y ago
  Lubuntu 18.04 has/had a blank/corrupted display issue with Virtualbox, if you run into it try enabling 3d acceleration: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lubuntu/comments/8g7t8u/lubuntu_18_does_not_install_on_virtualbox_only_a/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/Lubuntu/comments/8g7t8u/lubuntu_18_...
- theandrewbailey 8y ago
  Xubuntu in Virtualbox is part of my development stack on my Windows desktop. The real deal is Xubuntu on bare metal (not virtualized). It's worked well for years.
hd4 8y ago
This says more about how efficient KDE has become than how LXQt is performing, if they're feeling like KDE is eating LXQts lunch. I know people want choice and all, but I think we have reached the point where it would make sense for KDE to replace all other DEs purely for its sheer flexibility and performance. With every other DE there is some trade-off, usually in resource usage. KDE at start-up uses under 500mb with Kubuntu 18.04. Its the one reason I no longer need to upgrade my hardware, and can use it till it breaks.
- zanny 8y ago
  Additionally there are only three major memory hogs in KDE: Akonadi, purely associated with the KDEPim stuff. You can just uninstall it all without a fuss. Baloo, the file scanner. You can disable this outright. Plasmashell, which is the desktop applet engine. This is where I feel LXQT can find its niche, by providing a simpler shell that uses less resources than the plasmoid JS script container style the Plasma Shell uses. Without any of these running a KDE desktop with system services etc included is under 200MB, often under 100MB.
  - hd4 8y ago
    Honestly this entire post is a really good call, I didn't even realize whether or not I need all these. Is there a simple wiki or something out there that would help decide what can be disabled? edit: found this http://www.linux-databook.info/?page_id=3728 http://www.linux-databook.info/?page_id=3728
wink 8y ago
I've never been a Lubuntu user but the problem I see is that the Linux distros supporting x86 are getting rarer it seems. I have a 2004 nx7010 (awesome laptop, at the time and also 8 years later) that I sometimes use at home or grab to play around with and try out different distros and OSes. I used to use ArchLinux but they stopped supporting x86 a while ago. VoidLinux is also out. Right now I'm running OpenBSD 6.2 on it, which is nice - but the short release cycle for a machine you only start up like 3 times before the OS is EOLed kinda sucks. (Not OpenBSD's fault, of course.) So we'll see how long one can get a decent Ubuntu fallback solution (as in, it's big enough that enough people work on it that it will mostly work out of the box for these hobby projects of running old but not ancient hardware) for x86.
- crtasm 8y ago
  Last time I was hanging out in the xubuntu dev irc channel I think there was some chat about how they were short on x86 hardware to test on. Emulation is useful but isn't enough, if you need x86 consider running tests or donating hardware.
  - wink 8y ago
    See, that's the problem - it's not a real "need" - I have 2 old laptops I don't want to throw out. If I was donating them, my need would vanish ;) Sorry if it sounded like complaining, it wasn't my intention. I just think x86 is dying a slow death, there are not many "enthusiasts" like for e.g. 1980s or 1990s hardware where you have "this one ancient build everyone uses", but x86 has no discernible advantage over x64 these days (please don't name the the RAM requirements for 32 bit builds now :P) - so x64 is in 99% of cases superior and that's why it's rightfully supported. e.g. VAX, Sun SGI and C64 stuff is exciting, x86 in the age of x64 is just "older and slower" to most people.
    - crtasm 8y ago
      Complaining, no not at all. Equally I didn't mean to direct those suggestions directly at you :-)
deltron3030 8y ago
The main problem of desktop Linux is a lack of focus on audiences, most just copy the generalist mindset that Apple and MS adhere to, hoping to get a piece of that cake too. There where Linux is very successfull it's focused on audiences, like sys admins and devops people. But there's no serious focused distro for web and cross platform app designers/developers and other creators. That's something companies that make design tools could pull off, where the graphical framework of their tool becomes the framework of the OS, similar to how GTK (Gimp Tool Kit) was born, but in a more professional way.
Anonymous4C54D6 8y ago
How about we use a raspberry pi as a definition of an "old" machine? It's the most popular low powered system. Which distribution would you use?
- manaskarekar 8y ago
  Linaro and Raspbian both are based off LXDE if I recall correctly. Wonder if they will also (have already?) adopt LXQt?
yosefzeev 8y ago
I used Lubuntu on some old systems. I would say the problem being faced by the distro is not so much a matter of the focus, but the package management system could have used some work. If they kept their mission statement and developed something like the Aur in arch but obviously for older systems, I suspect they would do quite well.
sonaltr 8y ago
I'm not sure what to think about this - the next few releases would be the deciding factor. One of the main reasons I use Lubuntu is the fact that it got out of my way (install Lubuntu, remove the handful of stuff that came pre-installed, install i3 and get to work). With my above setup, I would idle with just 250 MB of RAM usage and almost no CPU usage. I loved that - as we have more and more electron apps (Slack, Teams, Atom, GitKraken etc.). I hope that bit of focus is not lost as not everyone has the affordability or the ability and access to buy a 32 GB i9 Macbook Pro and develop on. (My personal machine is a Thinkpad T420 with 8 GB RAM and a 250 GB SSD).
coleifer 8y ago
While it's true that you can run plain-old Ubuntu on a 10-year-old machine without problems, the growth in popularity of smaller ARM processors (rpi etc) also creates demand for a lightweight linux distro. When I read the title I assumed that Lubuntu's new direction was to move towards offering better support for such devices. Guess they're going the opposite direction...too bad.
- andai 8y ago
  I wonder if that factored into the discussion. I'm also hearing a lot of buzz about major OS (Windows, macOS) supporting ARM as a consumer platform in the near future.
qwerty12345a 8y ago
I use Lubuntu as my only OS on a Dell Latitude 5590 and I like the new direction they pronounced in their site a few days ago. I have never seen Lubuntu as a low end alternative, but as a capable OS that does not get into my way. Lubuntu's panel works without glitches on the side of screen allowing me use better the vertical screen size. The LXDE Lubuntu theme combined with Faenza icons is also very nice looking. I am sure LXQt will keep up same vision and the new direction matches my needs exactly. What I need is a smooth upgrade path when time comes to move to LXQt and that it support the features of LXDE I use now. I wish to LXQt and Lubuntu teams all the best to keep up their good work and I am looking forward for the new software.
sireat 8y ago
I am a bit shocked because until now Lubuntu was awesome at serving the older devices. Lubuntu was working great on one of the first netbooks from 2007 where other distributions out of the box were not. If people want modular or super configurable then Arch Linux has that use case pretty well covered does it not?

271 points by niutech 8y ago

I am quite concerned that network security is pushing very usable software and hardware to the junkyard. Is it possible that for a variety of reasons, it is better to have something reliable and stable, than to throw out working software because of intractable browser and network security problems ?

amaccuish 8y ago
sorry where was that bit in the article?
twblalock 8y ago
It's better to throw out insecure software. Computers with security problems get hacked and end up in botnets.
frio 8y ago
Most everything we do with computers in the modern world uses the network. If software is insecure -- is it really usable? Is it really reliable? I'd pretty strongly argue that the answer to both questions is no :).

megaman22 8y ago

It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more than capable of everything I throw at it. The upgrade cycle is essentially dead. That being said, I'm not clear on what the real difference between Lubuntu and Kubuntu will be now.

EpicEng 8y ago
>It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more than capable of everything I throw at it You must not throw much at it
- hug 8y ago
  I cannot think of a single AAA title in recent memory that causes my i7 2600k -- an 8 year old CPU -- to struggle. It can play absolutely every single modern game, with the only component upgrade in its 8 year life being the GPU.
  - sincerely 8y ago
    I'm not a huge gamer anymore but...isn't the main bottleneck for running AAA gaming at high settings the GPU?
    - SamReidHughes 8y ago
      It can be the CPU. But since four cores is the best everybody has, games don't push that.
    - nilkn 8y ago
      Generally yes, although there are certain games that an old CPU would definitely choke on. It’s a bit disingenuous to say the upgrade cycle is dead and then to spend more money on upgrading the GPU than the total value of everything else combined.
  - EpicEng 8y ago
    >I cannot think of a single AAA title in recent memory that causes my i7 2600k -- an 8 year old CPU -- to struggle I cannot think of any modern, graphically demanding game which is bottlenecked by the CPU. I imagine you are harming your GPU performance to some degree with such an old CPU though. Not sure I buy what you're saying here. What settings are you using?
    - hug 8y ago
      My point, of course, is that the only thing you’re going to measure a gaming rig by is gaming, which has very little to do with the age (or speed) of any component other than the GPU. Do you suspect, though, that the standard home user (or user of a repurposed old machine with Lubuntu on it, maybe) is going to be pushing those other components harder than a modern AAA game? Yeah, me neither. As an aside to answer your question:, I can run pretty much any game on its highest settings just fine with this machine: which is a gtx1070, 2600k, and 16gb of RAM driving a 120hz 1080p display. It was originally built with two HD5990s in crossfire.
scrollaway 8y ago
KDE and LXQt are radically different, even though they use the same underlying framework. In a way, it'll be the same difference as XFCE vs. GNOME.
- grawprog 8y ago
  I must admit these days i'm really preferring Qt over GTK. It's come a long way since I started using Linux. I remember looking at LXQt back when it was first released and found it fairly interesting but nowhere near developed enough for daily use. I always liked XFCE but found it lacking in customization and kind of buggy at the time I used it. Though it did keep my laptop going after a hardrivr failure running partitioned across 4 USB drives until I got a new one. It's cool to see LXQt in a state where lubuntu is adopting it as it's primary environment.
bscphil 8y ago
Even good quality laptop hardware is lasting. I'm using a laptop that's about 8 years old as my daily driver, and it can more than handle everything I need it to do - and that includes compiling software regularly. We've reached a great time for computers because pretty much any device you can buy (even used) can do all the stuff most people need to do. The primary advantage of newer gear is just reduced power requirements.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Hopefully this will be the next big battleground in the world of hardware. I'd love a laptop that could go days between charges.
shmerl 8y ago
> It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more than capable of everything I throw at it. The upgrade cycle is essentially dead. Not really for GPUs though. AMD progressed a lot and all the new features are landing in amdgpu, not in radeon. That's important especially for Vulkan support. Older GPUs are locked out of that completely. CPU progress is less rapid, but something like Ryzen is quite a breakthrough.
StavrosK 8y ago
> The upgrade cycle is essentially dead. It's terrible that we can't count on computers getting twice as fast every year any more. I guess it couldn't last for ever...
- andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  Nah, nah, it's about damn time software engineers start giving a shit about performance again.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    ...because we've already got all the computing power we'll ever need? You think software developers not caring about performance is why we can't quickly simulate weather systems or protein folding or do large-scale ML?
    - megaman22 8y ago
      I'd settle for text editors that don't lock up when I type an open paren. Or use entire sticks of RAM at rest.
      - ReverseCold 8y ago
        > text editors that don't lock up when I type an open paren This miiiiight be just you. Even sublime text (forget vim or another cli editor) runs fine on ancient hardware. What type of files are you editing? > Or use entire sticks of RAM at rest. I'd hope my text editors would use as much ram as it needs in order to give me the smoothest experience. If possible, that means storing the whole file in RAM (up to a set limit).
      - artursapek 8y ago
        Stop using editors written in Javascript by overpaid new-grads
      - sokoloff 8y ago
        Some here are old enough to remember "emacs: eight megabytes and constantly swapping", back when a stick of RAM could have been 8 Megabytes...

ArtWomb 8y ago

Writing this comment on a 4th gen Core-i5 laptop running Lubuntu booted into RAM. UX is just incredibly responsive. Up since Jun 1. And would probably run forever ;) But into the future I am very interested in restoring older laptops with ChromeOS / Neverware. Especially if they meet the requirements for running the Android / Linux container and studio. By mid-2020's chromebooks could account for 5% of global pc market share.

StavrosK 8y ago
I hadn't heard of Neverware before, so thanks for that. It looks like it's the Chromebook OS, does it force you to use the Google apps? Basically, is it usable without a Google account?
- remir 8y ago
  As far as I know, except for a guest account, there's no local account on Neverware, so you'll need a Google account to use it, which is unfortunate.
jcastro 8y ago
I'm doing this with neverware now, they just landed crostini in the dev release, but they've natively supported flatpak and docker for a while now. It's good stuff!
untog 8y ago
Agreed on Neverware. It's an absolute dream to hand over an old machine with Neverware installed to a relative with modest tech needs. It's very fast, and I don't get tech support calls any more. Win-win.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
That doesn't seem particularly old to me? I'm running the latest Fedora with KDE on a "4th gen Core-i5 laptop" and it's more than capable.

chx 8y ago

One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little bit less than ten years old but still older than Sandy Bridge. Someone did the math and it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair of CPUs in multithread performance https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#post-1043712895 https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-dual-x5670.1963388/#... Obviousy since we are talking of 8 new cores matching 12 old cores the single thread performance will be 50% faster. Wait, what? 50% faster? Is that all? I mean, many tasks are still single threaded and from 2010 to 2018 we have grown 50% in single thread and 100% in multithread? If things were going the "old way" then in 8 years would've seen a 2^(8/1.5) -- well over thirty times speedup (Moore's law as stated by David House who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months). You can see some of that http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm here. No wonder there's no point focusing on old CPUs any more.

mustaflex 8y ago
I have a desktop with an intel 3570k bought in 2012, I wanted to build a new gaming desktop with a ryzen 2700x. The ryzen is only 20% better in single threaded performance. I could easily overclock my cpu to close further the gap. Just need to upgrade my gpu and I'm good for a few more years. These cpus have aged quiet well.
- Nition 8y ago
  I recently replaced my main desktop PC after nine years and the new CPU benchmarks at only about twice the performance. Double the performance isn't too bad obviously, but that's about the same timespan as between the 486 and the Pentium III.
  - _arvin 8y ago
    I'm right there with you guys. I made my desktop in 2014 with a Haswell i5-4670K @ 3.4GHz. Overclocked it to 4.3GHz, and I still don't have a reason to upgrade. I really want a Ryzen 2700X also but staying patient. Newer and better hardware will keep coming out so I'm in no rush. (but my next CPU will definitely be AMD) My current thing right now is compiling the Linux kernel exactly catered to my Haswell machine, and using the latest gcc with "-march=native -O2" optimizations. It might seem minor, but man if she ain't screaming right now. I should mention I have an AMD RX 480 graphics card also. So I'm up-to-date in that world and enjoying the best of team red and blue right now. New drivers, software, kernels, and optimizations keep coming out that make my current hardware faster. But then came Spectre and Meltdown lol.

antoineMoPa 8y ago

I always loved Qt as a developer and hated it as a user. Every app/desktop environment written in it seem buggy and expensive on RAM. On the other side, I always loved GTK apps and their feel/design, but never got to make anything big myself in GTK. There are other points to this debate than RAM/Resources: Looks and feel, philosophy, feature bloatedness, etc.

pjmlp 8y ago
Given the endless messages that each Gtk+ based application vomits into stdout/stderr, I wouldn't say they are any better.
- antoineMoPa 8y ago
  The average user does not start applications from a terminal.
  - JasonFruit 8y ago
    Not even the average Linux user? I don't have any more data than you do, but I question that.
    - antoineMoPa 8y ago
      I mean, we have application menus for that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Not seeing the messages does not magically fix quality issues.
mrob 8y ago
I used to love GTK apps, but GTK3 has become almost unusable. I used XFCE for years, but now it's switched to GTK3 I've had to abandon it for LXDE (GTK2 version). Even something as simple as the XFCE text editor (Mousepad) now has pointless animations that you can't turn off and it constantly flickers unless you turn on compositing, which is useless latency increasing bloat. Everything about GTK3 feels like it was designed by somebody who'd rather be working on mobile apps. There's frequent animations deliberately wasting my time and distracting me, and excessive whitespace deliberately wasting my pixels. Maybe it's fixable with the complicated and unstable CSS based theming, but instead of fighting the system it would be easier to switch to Qt based apps. Qt at least appears to be designed for experienced users on desktops/laptops, not morons on phones.

manaskarekar 8y ago

I don't want to come across as ungrateful but I'm not very happy about this. I haven't looked into the reasons for this change but I'm sure there are some compelling ones to make such a big change. LXDE based Lubuntu struck the perfect balance (for me) between: - Being minimal and lightweight - but works out of the box with enough batteries included - tons of community resources due to being a ~buntu - very, very customizable (I love my undecorated windows and no bullshit shortcuts/decorations etc) - sane user experience, without any unnecessary bloat - LTS support (albeit shorter than other ~buntu releases). Yes, I can achieve these things some other way, but Lubuntu hit this sweet spot out of the box with minimal tweaking. Maybe LXQt will be great, may be not, but at this point it reminds me of Ubuntu 10.10 which, IMHO, was as refined as Ubuntu (or any linux distro at the time) could be, and then they just decided to throw all that maturity and refinement away and start from scratch. I truly hope LXQt based Lubuntu succeeds, but it's a sad day to me.

devxpy 8y ago
Ubuntu 10.10, huh. I'm not old enough to have experienced that, but I can say that we have the same thing happening with 16.04 They had it almost perfect and decided to throw it all out. History does repeat itself...
- MetaDark 8y ago
  Not old enough? Well this makes me feel old even though I'm not. I'm 22 and my first version of Ubuntu was 8.04.
  - woolvalley 8y ago
    I'm guessing they got into using linux later in life. Not all of us messed with linux when we were 12 ;)
    - hobs 8y ago
      Still made me feel a billion years old as I am pretty sure I had quite a few Warty Warthog cds around at one point.

peatmoss 8y ago

As an exercise, I threw OpenBSD and GNUStep on a machine the other day. I wouldn’t say GNUStep provides the best Free/Open desktop, but I want to believe that it could. The thing is, many of the modern Linux desktops seem to be heavily wedded to a lot of dconf and systemd infrastructure. OpenBSD has managed to build analogs for enough of the heavily Linux-centric infrastructure that Gnome 3 depends on, but man it’s clear that Gnome 3 was written with Linux and only Linux in mind. I didn’t see KDE in the OpenBSD ports when I looked, and I suspect it too is because KDE has become wedded to Linux-only services. XFCE remains the most portable full-featured Desktop environment and runs well on OpenBSD. But GNUStep... GNUStep is my biggest regret. GNUStep isn’t entirely comparable to XFCE, because GNUStep isn’t a desktop. It’s more like all GTK plus dconf plus all the desktop services required for interaction between GUI apps plus a uniform display layer. In short, GNUStep is more or less like Cocoa from macOS. Add GWorkspace, and you have a solid reimplementation of macOS’s Finder. I wish GNUStep had caught on or that someone would inject new life into it. There are apps that compile on both GNUstep and macOS. For whatever reason macOS seems to attract better desktop apps—both Free and commercial. Had GNUStep and not KDE or Gnome become the defacto *Nix desktop, I imagine people would be writing macOS apps for free on Linux, and macOS users would be recompiling apps to run on Linux... and not just Linux, but all the platforms that GNUStep supports, like OpenBSD and Windows. EDIT: Oh yeah, and why I thought to write this, is because GTK vs QT both feel like lower potential toolkits. And GNUStep also feels very lightweight and portable.

0xcde4c3db 8y ago
> I didn’t see KDE in the OpenBSD ports when I looked, and I suspect it too is because KDE has become wedded to Linux-only services. I doubt this is the issue. KDE Plasma 5 seemed okay on FreeBSD when I tried it recently, although I don't have any recent KDE+Linux experience to compare it with. More likely there just hasn't been enough developer interest to get it properly ported to OpenBSD. Edit: To get more at your actual point, I've had similar feelings about GNUStep, but when I dug into it I felt like there was just too much of a mismatch with the rest of the FOSS GUI ecosystem. Maybe I'd be a die-hard devotee if I'd tried it back in the '90s as my first thing after fvwm-configured-to-look-like-mwm.

rocky1138 8y ago

This makes sense for things like x86, but what about ARM stuff? It tends to be low power in both wattage and speed, perfect for Lubuntu. I'd love to see even more effort on things like the Pinebook.

apatters 8y ago

> our main focus is shifting from (providing a distribution for old hardware) to a (functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out of the way and letting users use their computer.) I like Lubuntu and often use it for low powered devices and sometimes devices that aren't so low powered. This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus. Here's how you should have said it: We are focusing our resources on developing a fast, clean, functional distribution for devices manufactured in the last ten years. Then you can go on to explain the rationale (which is all quite sensible, if you don't want to support hardware that's 15-20 years old, you don't have to, it's a pretty niche market anyway).

asadjb 8y ago
I have never used Lubuntu other than trying it out a few times, so this is just going off of the content in the article. > This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus To me, it seems that they ran the numbers (kudos to them for taking an empirical approach) and figured out that their original USP was now no longer unique enough, and they need to do something different to stay in the game. But this article makes it seem like they haven't figured out what that something different is. They list a number of things they are going to provide, including: - leverage modern, Qt-based technologies and programs to give users a functional yet modular experience - Lubuntu will continue to be a transparent and open distribution - create and maintain complete documentation And a few others. But none of these seem to be different enough from the other great choices available as Ubuntu flavors. That's just my read on the article anyway.
- Animats 8y ago
  "Modern, Qt-based technologies?" Qt is 27 years old. It came out for Windows 3.1.
  - bmn__ 8y ago
    It did not stop improving since then. "Modern" describes the current status, not when it came out initially.

zmix 8y ago

PR blurb, telling us, that Lubuntu is going to die within the next two years, or so.

pseudonym2 8y ago
You're downvoted a lot because you didn't substantiate your claim, but I assume many people, myself included, agree with the sentiment. Up until now Lubuntu had a clear goal: Create a usable Ubuntu-compatible distribution that runs on old hardware. Now the goals are so vague and subjective that they lead to nowhere. Sure, this won't matter in the short term, but sooner or later the project will get completely derailed because of different interpretations of this dumb statement. They can still make a good lightweight OS that runs on 10 year old hardware. There's no reason to change the goal. Sure, it's no longer a massive challenge, but it doesn't have to be. If the developers want to try new things they can fork it.

hyperpallium 8y ago

Are low-end phones now on par with these 10 year old systems? It's difficult to find a phone with less than 1 GB RAM. And although ARM CPUs are much less powerful than x86 with the same clock, 1 GHz also seems a mininum.

riquito 8y ago
Nevermind arm/Intel, consider that the Intel processor of a notebook is way less powerful than its desktop counterpart

axaxs 8y ago

I don't understand the rationale behind a separate group/committee/website/idea for the same distro with different defaults. I worked with the Antergos team, a team of 4 people, to write a distro that let you pick and choose everything, from DE to browsers. While I've mainly faded away they are still hard at it. In short, if we can support nearly every DE with 4 volunteers, what are these *buntus spending their resources on?

xorcist 8y ago
The boring answer is probably "because defaults matter". But you are of course right that it would be less work for all people involved if these were instead Debian Derivatives or Fedora Spins where the useful infrastructure, developer processes etc. are already in place. I guess it all comes down to branding, and the fact that starting over is easier right at the beginning.
michaelmrose 8y ago
Antergos most emphatically isn't a distro it's just an installer for arch Linux and quite frankly a poorly designed one that does not always actually work. After the installer runs if it actually works you aren't left with something much different from a normal arch installation. The actual distro developers have a lot of work to do as far as assembling a wide range of components and often writing their own like package management systems and recipes for building thousands of packages. Its unsurprising that people writing 0.1% of distro badly doesn't require much work.
- axaxs 8y ago
  Sorry, I don't follow. Your second paragraph is rather accurate. That said, I don't see how that's different from the various flavors of Ubuntu. I would consider Lubuntu an Ubuntu installer...
- Klover 8y ago
  Well that’s mean. But I have to agree that it doesn’t actually work 99% of the time for me. It certainly is easier to install arch than it is trying to debug cnchi. Arch requires so much typing, but at least the installation is reliable.

known 8y ago

I'm a Lubuntu user; I'll shift to https://clearlinux.org https://clearlinux.org

mastrsushi 8y ago

I don't know if QT is part of the reason what makes KDE so sluggish, but if thats the case, Lubuntu switching to LXQT might have a lot to do with this challenge. If that's the case, I really have no idea why they're so hell bent on the transition from GTK. If love for them to migrate to JWM, but last time I checked the L in Lubuntu is for LXDE. Is there really any benefit in adopting QT or are they just following what they see as the "forward" direction. LXDE doesn't have to look glossy, skeumorphic, and outdated. A skin is superficial, I would do anything to avoid QTumor.

youwishboye 8y ago
> I don't know if QT is part of the reason what makes KDE so sluggish What are you talking about mate? Have you tried KDE in the last 3 years?
genghizkhan 8y ago
As far as I've seen, it's not. I used razor-qt when it was still an independent project and I pretty much fell in love with the idea of it. Gnome 3 was being a PITA (I remember throwing things when my artfully crafted css broke with an upgrade) and KDE hadn't crossed over into version 5. I'd tried out XFCE at that point. It didn't excite me because I didn't want to get stuck with GTK 2. I just downloaded razor-qt and realised that with a bit of spit, shine and polish, this had the potential to become what LXDE was to Gnome. I'm pretty happy about LXQT emerging from the LXDE/razor-qt merger. Anyway, back to your question. razor-qt was pretty snappy on my machine, leading me to conclude that KDE was slow because it was KDE. Akonadi, slow animations, buggy widgets, you name it. I haven't tried KDE since then (this was back in 2012 or so), but I've heard that the latest incarnations are pretty snappy and light. Even if they aren't, I highly doubt LXQT will have any problems with lag.
simion314 8y ago
Qt works on embedded systems so it is an optimized toolkit, if a Qt app feels slow then most of the time the fault is with the app developer.
slezyr 8y ago
> I really have no idea why they're so hell bent on the transition from GTK Because otherwise they have to develop it? > A skin is superficial, I would do anything to avoid QTumor. Do me a favour.

dooyogi 8y ago

Besides running on old hardware, the main benefit of distros like Lubuntu and Xubuntu is that they run well in VirtualBox without reliable GPU support. Ubuntu with Gnome 3 is almost unusable in VirtualBox.

mrweasel 8y ago
When you see people recommend new Linux users that they could try Ubuntu in VirtualBox, to get familier with it, I often wonder what kind of impression they walk away with. An modern Linux distribution in a vm, running on your laptop typically isn't all that great an experience.
fbnlsr 8y ago
Thanks for that comment. I've tried using Ubuntu inside VirtualBox on my brand new i7-8700 / 16 GB RAM computer and it's far from being smooth. I'll give Xubuntu a try.
crtasm 8y ago
Lubuntu 18.04 has/had a blank/corrupted display issue with Virtualbox, if you run into it try enabling 3d acceleration: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lubuntu/comments/8g7t8u/lubuntu_18_does_not_install_on_virtualbox_only_a/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/Lubuntu/comments/8g7t8u/lubuntu_18_...
theandrewbailey 8y ago
Xubuntu in Virtualbox is part of my development stack on my Windows desktop. The real deal is Xubuntu on bare metal (not virtualized). It's worked well for years.

hd4 8y ago

This says more about how efficient KDE has become than how LXQt is performing, if they're feeling like KDE is eating LXQts lunch. I know people want choice and all, but I think we have reached the point where it would make sense for KDE to replace all other DEs purely for its sheer flexibility and performance. With every other DE there is some trade-off, usually in resource usage. KDE at start-up uses under 500mb with Kubuntu 18.04. Its the one reason I no longer need to upgrade my hardware, and can use it till it breaks.

zanny 8y ago
Additionally there are only three major memory hogs in KDE: Akonadi, purely associated with the KDEPim stuff. You can just uninstall it all without a fuss. Baloo, the file scanner. You can disable this outright. Plasmashell, which is the desktop applet engine. This is where I feel LXQT can find its niche, by providing a simpler shell that uses less resources than the plasmoid JS script container style the Plasma Shell uses. Without any of these running a KDE desktop with system services etc included is under 200MB, often under 100MB.
- hd4 8y ago
  Honestly this entire post is a really good call, I didn't even realize whether or not I need all these. Is there a simple wiki or something out there that would help decide what can be disabled? edit: found this http://www.linux-databook.info/?page_id=3728 http://www.linux-databook.info/?page_id=3728

wink 8y ago

I've never been a Lubuntu user but the problem I see is that the Linux distros supporting x86 are getting rarer it seems. I have a 2004 nx7010 (awesome laptop, at the time and also 8 years later) that I sometimes use at home or grab to play around with and try out different distros and OSes. I used to use ArchLinux but they stopped supporting x86 a while ago. VoidLinux is also out. Right now I'm running OpenBSD 6.2 on it, which is nice - but the short release cycle for a machine you only start up like 3 times before the OS is EOLed kinda sucks. (Not OpenBSD's fault, of course.) So we'll see how long one can get a decent Ubuntu fallback solution (as in, it's big enough that enough people work on it that it will mostly work out of the box for these hobby projects of running old but not ancient hardware) for x86.

crtasm 8y ago
Last time I was hanging out in the xubuntu dev irc channel I think there was some chat about how they were short on x86 hardware to test on. Emulation is useful but isn't enough, if you need x86 consider running tests or donating hardware.
- wink 8y ago
  See, that's the problem - it's not a real "need" - I have 2 old laptops I don't want to throw out. If I was donating them, my need would vanish ;) Sorry if it sounded like complaining, it wasn't my intention. I just think x86 is dying a slow death, there are not many "enthusiasts" like for e.g. 1980s or 1990s hardware where you have "this one ancient build everyone uses", but x86 has no discernible advantage over x64 these days (please don't name the the RAM requirements for 32 bit builds now :P) - so x64 is in 99% of cases superior and that's why it's rightfully supported. e.g. VAX, Sun SGI and C64 stuff is exciting, x86 in the age of x64 is just "older and slower" to most people.
  - crtasm 8y ago
    Complaining, no not at all. Equally I didn't mean to direct those suggestions directly at you :-)

deltron3030 8y ago

The main problem of desktop Linux is a lack of focus on audiences, most just copy the generalist mindset that Apple and MS adhere to, hoping to get a piece of that cake too. There where Linux is very successfull it's focused on audiences, like sys admins and devops people. But there's no serious focused distro for web and cross platform app designers/developers and other creators. That's something companies that make design tools could pull off, where the graphical framework of their tool becomes the framework of the OS, similar to how GTK (Gimp Tool Kit) was born, but in a more professional way.

Anonymous4C54D6 8y ago

How about we use a raspberry pi as a definition of an "old" machine? It's the most popular low powered system. Which distribution would you use?

manaskarekar 8y ago
Linaro and Raspbian both are based off LXDE if I recall correctly. Wonder if they will also (have already?) adopt LXQt?

yosefzeev 8y ago

I used Lubuntu on some old systems. I would say the problem being faced by the distro is not so much a matter of the focus, but the package management system could have used some work. If they kept their mission statement and developed something like the Aur in arch but obviously for older systems, I suspect they would do quite well.

sonaltr 8y ago

I'm not sure what to think about this - the next few releases would be the deciding factor. One of the main reasons I use Lubuntu is the fact that it got out of my way (install Lubuntu, remove the handful of stuff that came pre-installed, install i3 and get to work). With my above setup, I would idle with just 250 MB of RAM usage and almost no CPU usage. I loved that - as we have more and more electron apps (Slack, Teams, Atom, GitKraken etc.). I hope that bit of focus is not lost as not everyone has the affordability or the ability and access to buy a 32 GB i9 Macbook Pro and develop on. (My personal machine is a Thinkpad T420 with 8 GB RAM and a 250 GB SSD).

coleifer 8y ago

While it's true that you can run plain-old Ubuntu on a 10-year-old machine without problems, the growth in popularity of smaller ARM processors (rpi etc) also creates demand for a lightweight linux distro. When I read the title I assumed that Lubuntu's new direction was to move towards offering better support for such devices. Guess they're going the opposite direction...too bad.

andai 8y ago
I wonder if that factored into the discussion. I'm also hearing a lot of buzz about major OS (Windows, macOS) supporting ARM as a consumer platform in the near future.

qwerty12345a 8y ago

I use Lubuntu as my only OS on a Dell Latitude 5590 and I like the new direction they pronounced in their site a few days ago. I have never seen Lubuntu as a low end alternative, but as a capable OS that does not get into my way. Lubuntu's panel works without glitches on the side of screen allowing me use better the vertical screen size. The LXDE Lubuntu theme combined with Faenza icons is also very nice looking. I am sure LXQt will keep up same vision and the new direction matches my needs exactly. What I need is a smooth upgrade path when time comes to move to LXQt and that it support the features of LXDE I use now. I wish to LXQt and Lubuntu teams all the best to keep up their good work and I am looking forward for the new software.

sireat 8y ago

I am a bit shocked because until now Lubuntu was awesome at serving the older devices. Lubuntu was working great on one of the first netbooks from 2007 where other distributions out of the box were not. If people want modular or super configurable then Arch Linux has that use case pretty well covered does it not?