#LXQt

[estradiolicphysics]

The urge to try out new desktop environments just to get a feel of them, and to customise them to your heart and eyes' fullest desires!

[sl33py-g4m3r]

Debian 12 xfce ~~~~ let's go~~~~~

I complained about debian not having wifi drivers upon live cd boot, apparently that was by design for the older versions as (i think?) device drivers like that might be proprietary and non-free. and debian ships usually free and open source packages....

so that was by design~~ they changed it I think in debian 12, which I'm late to finding lol.

I missed the transparency thing xfce does sometimes~~~ I like xfce's compositor~~ and for some reason I don't like KDE when I tried it before and hadn't tried it since~~

could've tried it but just jumped on xfce desktop with debian 12, especially cause I've come to like thunar file manager over dolphin (? was that kde's?)

just got it up and running~~ tho I forget (or don't know) how to update the system yet.... mint has an update manager, or it's a cinnamon desktop thing..... idk.... tho I'm guessing "sudo apt-get update"

I like the splash screen and grub menu~~~ and (not that linux mint debian was unstable cause it wasn't~~) I hope debian is really stable~~ ot that's what I read anyway~~

and my function keys still work, lol. unlike upon fresh windows install~~

and I can still access the other hard drive~~ but for some reason upon unmounting it it says that there's still something going on or data is being written to it, but then it seems to unmount fine anyway~~ so I hope nothing is going wrong already~~ lol

continually talking about linux cause I got nowhere else to~~ lol sorry for cluttering up the tags if they aren't correct at all~~

now to install vlc and stuff lol~~ and hopefully find more xfce-4 themes so I can get it looking like windows 95 lol

or what's a better desktop environment than xfce? I tried lxde and it's supposedly not getting updated anymore so better to try lxqt in that case? it's newer.... Cinnamon is nice but got bored of it w mint, kde I didn't like back when I tried it a decade ago and hadn't touched it since.... hadn't messed w GNOME either in a long while either tho, I miss the sidebar and quick access to workspaces but didn't like it for other reasons too... or maybe it wasn't as customizeable..... or I didn't know how.....

currently rocking debian 12 as the title suggests w xfce desktop environment~~~ but could maybe switch to lxqt ~~~ but idk how to wipe all components from xfce and install lxqt...

and I don't like having more than one desktop environment installed cause that leads to duplicate apps

*side glances at how many terminal emulators are here anyway*

which do I choose? there are so many~~~ but lately I like xfce~~~ and might give lxqt a shot~~~ idk.....

there are so many and I already have a hard time choosing anyway lol

also just realized that the installer didn't ask for a root password so i have to "sudo" every single time cause I can't run as root directly.

and for some reason my username didn't capitalize so I tried to log into the system and it said the password was incorrect, I knew the password was correct, I made the first letter of my username small and i was in~~~

wtf~~~ did it lowercase it in the installer and I didn't realize it? is this what happened before when I tried to install debian years ago? I just reinstalled mint like an idiot instead of trying things T_T;;

tho I still consider myself a newbie cause arch, opensuse, slackware and others like that scare me ~~~ but they'd get me to learn~~ I just don't know enough to use them yet.

which begs the question, should I be running debian anyway? or should I just go back to mint?p

second guessing myself after a SUCCESSFUL INSTALL~~~~~ rip. but I like what I got going..... and cinnamon was getting boring lol

tldr: I'm taking tumblr on the linux journey with me~~~ :) hopefully typing about it into the void will help me be less anxious about trying stuff and potentially breaking my system~~ lol cause ya can always install a system that you know works~~ if something breaks.

happy to be running the grandpa of a whole bunch of linux distributions :)

hopefully I'm smarter than I think and this'll be fine~~~ worry I'll break stuff constantly~~~~ and I really don't like not knowing what I'm doing cause I feel stupid but that's how you learn to begin with, isn't it?

[linuxiarzepl]

LXQt 2.0

Została wydana nowa wersja środowiska graficznego LXQt 2.0 https://linuxiarze.pl/lxqt-2-0/

[incohearent]

Featherpad is Notepad from Windows but powerful. The text selection in the MATE text editor bugs out and moves text when I mean to highlight (probably not a bug but it is for me), meanwhile Featherpad, native of LXQt, is intuitive and customizeable. The find and replace is as good as I ever knew how to use the one in Notepad++, although Bluefish's (an approachable, open-source GTK-based IDE) is more versatile with regex as far as my amateur brain can tell.

Now that I have this bash script from the command at stack overflow to remove line breaks I can more readily write html post and put them into the submission syntax for pytumblr.

#!/bin/bash tr '\n' ' ' < "$1" | sed "s/\('[0-9]\{4\}\)/\r\n\1/g"

I name the script stringit, keep it in ~/.local/bin/, using the UI to make it executable and make it trusted, and go into the terminal and enter stringit article.html and it outputs into the terminal a version without linebreaks and I copy that into my clipboard, put it in featherpad, escape the apostraphes ' with a backlash as \', and then copy the escaped text into the pytumblr syntax, which is a totally different thing but yeah.

I love HTML since I can possessively modify it. First time I ever needed it for anything was for fanfiction archival, although I am much better than I used to be, little things like needing a converting a legible article into a single line of HTML I still don’t know how to do until recently.

[mountmortar]

i want to like linux mint so bad because it's obvious that a lot of love was put into it and i can clearly see why it's lauded as one of the greatest linux distros for absolute beginners but unfortunately it's the only distro (out of the very many that i've tried) that wants to fight like hell against reading my wifi card at all costs for some reason and also i just do not really like any of the desktop environments they ship it out with. which is a shame because again it's obvious that a lot of love was put into cinnamon. i just can't vibe with it at all

[nksistemas]

Alpine Linux 3.22 ya está disponible con GNOME 48, KDE Plasma 6.3 y LXQt 2.2

El equipo de desarrollo de Alpine Linux ha anunciado el lanzamiento oficial de Alpine Linux 3.22, una nueva versión importante de esta distribución independiente y centrada en la seguridad. Con esta actualización, Alpine continúa posicionándose como una opción ligera y modular para usuarios avanzados, servidores y sistemas embebidos. Novedades destacadas Alpine Linux 3.22 llega más de seis meses…

[vvatchword]

As you may recall, I got the Linux Mint distro for my old netbook, which has 250 GB HDD, 2 GB of RAM, and the Intel Atom N455 (1.66 GHz). This netbook has always been cheap and terrible but I find myself repeatedly needing to access a Not-Phone for various purposes in very strange places and hey, the money's been spent, I can just use this thing, right?

Anyway, Linux Mint has been a terrible idea. 2 GB of RAM is on its low end and DAMN do I feel it. The internet hurts. Word processing hurts. Manuskript hurts. Obviously, this means I chose the wrong distro.

But looking at other low-end distros is terrifying. They're for more advanced users and my Linux know-how is shit. xfce and LxQT expect me to know what I'm doing. I need to get this fixed up in a few days and what if it doesn't work for what I need?

My goal is to use spreadsheets and word processors, Manuskript, and the internet. I'm going to install some further add-ons to Firefox to disable scripts etc. I don't think my Internet experience will ever be stellar, but I would like to access pages within you know. a minute or two.

Another possibility is that I could buy a laptop before Our Wise White Leader uberfucks our collective shit. If I do that I'll have to act fast. Like today fast. Shit is selling like hotcakes for exactly the reasons you can imagine.

At one point I looked up the Macbook Pro, which frankly is one of the best products for graphic design, and it's like. what was I THINKING. I am unemployed. Where am I gonna get money like that

I thought about trying to crowdfund but that just seems... idk. It feels like a want and not a need. It's just that I keep having to leave my desktops behind so often, which has never historically been a problem until literally the last two years. Why does this KEEP HAPPENING. Should I lean into it and just admit I'm homeless

Do you guys have any opinions

should I just throw myself into a pit of lions perhaps

[maplecinnamonbun]

is LXQT okay? 🥺

good morning to everyone except for gnome users

[verilog-official]

why does lxde not exist anymore? also it looks like it’s censoring lude lmao

lxde technically does still exist and it is still actively being worked on, but ever since GTK2 was deprecated and most of the team migrated to lxqt progress has been really slow

core components like pcmanfm are getting the most attention, but the rest of lxde is pretty neglected at this point

[wayfire-official]

The fact that the arch install iso includes the Debian installer makes me think about making some sort of iso that just has a bunch of installers for multiple different distros. Like, ventoy is cool and useful for being able to have multiple Isos, but why would you even need multiple, if one was enough? Most distros allow you to download all that shit during the install anyways, so you don't really need to keep it all on the iso unless you really need to install Linux without internet.

So, just have a neat little distro specifically for installing other distros. Has some lightweight DE like lxqt or something, a couple of tools for recovering broken systems, and just a bunch of installers for different distros

[ailurinae]

The Linux desktop is a disaster right now. It was overall in a better state in 2008 TBH.

Wayland is clearly the future and the better option overall, Xorg is getting bare minimal maintenance, but right now the only real options for Wayland are barebones ones like Sway, which need things like menus, taskbars, notifications set up independently, or KDE or Gnome which are truly obnoxiously large and heavy. KDE in the Plasma era also has an obnoxious amout of churn in libraries.

Aside from X11/Wayland issues, we are also in the pulseaudio/pipewire transition, though that should be rather faster and easier. There is also the mess of flatpak/snap/appimage. There are theoretically some benefits of that style, but all of them have major issues, plus the fragmented landscape between the three of them.

And last but not least, the ongoing move to the "portal" system, which again can have theoretical benefits for functionality and permissions, but right now the transition is pretty rough.

I honestly wouldn't recommend the Linux desktop to basically anyone right now. The one exception might be for people with super minimal needs and skills on the computer, who have family who can set it up and fix it for them. People who just do email, some web browsing, video, maybe some Word/Excel (if they can use Libre Office instead or use Wine for MS office)

Games are probably the best they have ever been on Linux, with Valve's investment, but the rest of the desktop experience is just too obnoxious right now IMO. So I just keep going with cleaned up Windows 10, and WSL and VMs

(I used Linux as my primary desktop for over a decade, from about 2002-2014ish I think? I used KDE and various lightweight window managers, including tiling WMs. I could do the full setup needed for getting all components working together for Sway or others, but I simply no longer care to)

I hate to be the annoying person who recommends Linux to everyone but like... how could you not switch to Linux at this point.

[ntrlily]

if you're not penguin enough to have an opinion but want to see the results for some reason just pollute the poll numbers 🐧👍

[manjaro-official]

I know it's supposed to be 'ell ex cute' but I will never read LXQt as anything other than 'licksquit'

[andmaybegayer]

Any recommendations/cautions about using Alpine Linux on the desktop? It's always intrigued me and you're the only person I've seen post about it

Alpine is pretty good for desktop, very stable, good security practice, professional development philosophy, broad package availability. You will run into some very obvious pitfalls, although they can mostly be obviated by using some modern applications.

The Alpine wiki is a little sparse and at times can be weirdly focussed, like spending a lot of the installation page talking about the very specific usecase of a diskless install. Nonetheless, it's quite good and should be your first port of call. A lot of the things I'm mentioning here are well covered in the article on Daily Driving for Desktop use. I'm basically just editorializing here.

The installation procedure is command-line only, but pretty straightforward, you run setup-alpine and follow the prompts, assuming you want a basic system. If you need special disk partitioning, you'll usually have to do it yourself. There's a whole whackload of helpers to get you set up, like setup-desktop which will help you install any of 'gnome', 'plasma', 'xfce', 'mate', 'sway', or 'lxqt'. Most of these are called by setup-alpine for you, but not the desktop one. You can call it at any time though.

Most obviously, musl libc, no glibc. Packaged software will work fine. There's a compatibility shim called gcompat that will usually work, but might fall apart on more complicated software expecting glibc, for example I've had no luck running glibc AppImages. For more complex software, Flatpaks are a good option, e.g. Steam runs great on Alpine as a Flatpak, I run the Homestuck Companion Flatpak. Your last ditch is containerization and chroots, which are fortunately really easy to handle, just install podman and Distrobox and you can run anything that won't run on Alpine inside a Fedora or Debian or Whatever container seamlessly with your desktop.

Less obviously: no systemd. Systemd underpins some really common features of modern Linux and not having it around means you have to use a few different tools that are anywhere from comparable to a little worse for some tasks. Packaged applications will work smoothly, just learn the OpenRC invocations, Alpine has a really great wiki. For writing your own services, it's a lot more limited than SystemD, you're not going to have full access to like, udev functionality, instead you get the good but kind of weird eudev system.

If you're mainly installing things from the repos you'll barely notice the difference, other than that every package is split up into three, <package>, <package>-docs, and <package>-dev. This is a container-y thing, to allow Alpine container images to install the smallest possible packageset. If you need man pages you'll have to install them specifically.

Alpine has a very solid main repo, and a community repo that's plenty good, and worth enabling on any desktop system. It'll generally be automatically enabled when you set up a desktop anyway, but just a notice if you're going manual. You can run Stable alpine, which updates every six months, or if you want you can run Edge, which is a rolling release of packages as they get added. Lots of very up-to-date software, and pretty stable as these go. You can go from Stable->Edge pretty easily, going back not so much.

There's also the Testing repo, only available on Edge, which I don't really recommend, especially since apkbuild files are so easy to run if you just need one thing that has most of its dependencies met.

Package management is with APK, which is fast and easy to work with. The wiki page will cover you.

Side note: if you want something more batteries-included, you could look at Postmarket, an Alpine derivative mainly focussed on running on smartphones but that is a pretty capable desktop OS, and which has a fairly friendly setup process. I run this on an ARM Chromebook and it's solid. Installation requires some reading between the lines because it's intended for the weird world of phones, so you'll probably want to follow the PMBootstrap route.