LXDE is back

After many years of inactivity and due to dated code becoming problematic with late gcc developments, LXDE has received updates in the past few weeks. About the only two packages left untouched is lxpolkit and lxpanel, the rest of the group has been updated. This is a good thing because it was about the only desktop not falling pray to systemd/logind and dbus-ism.

Some said that LXDE was abandoned because of #LXQT, a lightweight #plasma / #kde thing that resembled very little of what lxde was and became just as infected by systemd mechanisms as xfce4 and others. The systemd mainstays, #debian, #ubuntu, #mint, #fedora, rushed to replace lxde with lxqt. What they sold was the name of LXDE of stability and lightweight applications to associate with the buggy LXQT dt. Why was it buggy? Because it is a corporate rat race, one chasing behind the other, Qt, Kde, plasma, and back again. By the time they’d patch one side the other had bugs. And lxqt had to follow this madness.

*Note: Qt is a graphic platform for all the Qt based applications, and desktops, ported to be identical in X and in wayland, in theory, in practice … not quite ported YET! *

What we should know, here in #joborun, is that you don’t have to run #LXDE as a complete desktop, you can run its components individually into openbox, like lxpanel for panel/menu/dock etc. pcmanfm as desktop are with icons (pcmanfm --desktop ) lxrandr, lxappearance or lxappearance-obconf, lxlaunch, lxtask, lxterminal, etc., Only lxsession requires a logind (consolekit2 in our case) polkit and dbus. This is the component that makes the difference of the full desktop. This has the benefit of starting something like gparted or pamac-manager from menu and raise/lower root/user rights automatically, or automount devices (another mess and a half).

Long ago when Poettering was asked at a conference why was he treating users like they were disabled, his response was "what do you have against disabled people?"

This underlines the entire logic of systemd and most desktops. #LXDE is the exception

LXDE source

Stay sane

#joborun