LXDE, the worst DE

[dasein]

Hey tuxracer, I'm starting to get the impression that you are not fond of lxde. I'm probably wrong.

There you go again, jumping to conclusions.

I have to say, I think the thread title is spot on. Among the full-fledged DEs, LXDE is the youngest and (not surprisingly) the most unpolished. Frankly, I wish it were better; I want to like LXDE, but I just can't.

Still, I like the idea behind LXDE. Maybe someday.

[bw123]

Well, I hit another mystery (to me anyway) about menus. I have been using fluxbox and I really like it. It's fast, simple, and uses an automatic menuing system called 'menu' I believe that automatically finds just about everything I install. Somehow fluxbox uses files in /usr/share/menu to make /etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu which basically is a pretty much human readable script-like language. Don't really have to fool with it, works great. It's a little tricky to customize but I haven't really needed to.

I'm trying compiz out a little, there's no toolbar? so snagged lxpanel, and it's using some .desktop files located at /usr/share/applications for it's menu, and not all apps are making these files when they are installed. I -think- this is just an lxpanel thing, but not sure.

Anybody know whether I am on the right track or what? does lxpanel suck? it's pretty small and simple and I like that, but I don't want to fool with setting up a bunch of menu junk...

[dasein]

From what I have observed, folks who use *box as WMs but still want some sort of panel seem to like tint2. A few like wbar. But ultimately, as with all such things, it always comes down to personal preference(s).

[AMLJ]

LXDE... I didn't use to like it very much, but now things have changed...
In my opinion, it's kinda poor, but when someone has a very old computer, and doesn't like to have just a WM and wants a DE, GNOME and KDE might not work very well, while LXDE does.
When you want a light "DE" it's not such a bad choice...

[jw013]

From what I have observed, folks who use *box as WMs but still want some sort of panel seem to like tint2. A few like wbar. But ultimately, as with all such things, it always comes down to personal preference(s).

Lol I am one of those people: openbox/tint2.

Well, I hit another mystery (to me anyway) about menus. I have been using fluxbox and I really like it. It's fast, simple, and uses an automatic menuing system called 'menu' I believe that automatically finds just about everything I install. Somehow fluxbox uses files in /usr/share/menu to make /etc/X11/fluxbox/fluxbox-menu which basically is a pretty much human readable script-like language. Don't really have to fool with it, works great. It's a little tricky to customize but I haven't really needed to.

I'm trying compiz out a little, there's no toolbar? so snagged lxpanel, and it's using some .desktop files located at /usr/share/applications for it's menu, and not all apps are making these files when they are installed. I -think- this is just an lxpanel thing, but not sure.

Anybody know whether I am on the right track or what? does lxpanel suck? it's pretty small and simple and I like that, but I don't want to fool with setting up a bunch of menu junk...

If you like the fluxbox menu, that's great - why not continue using it? Lxpanel doesn't force you to use its menu - you can remove it from the panel if you wish. Tint2 doesn't have a menu - it's just a taskbar. When I want a menu I simply use openbox's, but I hardly use a menu nowadays b/c I've been using the same apps long enough to have mapped everything I use to keyboard shortcuts (gvim, iceweasel, terminals, music players, etc).

[bw123]

If you like the fluxbox menu, that's great - why not continue using it?

yeah, well that's the thing, can't do the fancy compiz junk on fluxbox, just playing around. compiz is sort of looking like a gnome addon so far... and I don't have gnome. Works okay and I lost about 20% performance with 8-10 plugins enabled, not too bad.

I like the lxpanel it's pretty good, just needs to support the other menu files, or I am going to have to figure out how to turn a bunch of these:

Code: Select all

#/usr/share/menu/epdfview
# fluxbox way
?package(epdfview):needs="X11" section="Applications/Viewers"\
 title="Epdfview" command="/usr/bin/epdfview"\
 hints="Documents" icon="/usr/share/pixmaps/epdfview.xpm"

into these:

Code: Select all

#/usr/share/applications/epdfview.desktop 
# lxpanel way
[Desktop Entry]
Categories=Viewer;Office;GTK;
Comment=Lightweight PDF document viewer
Comment[ca]=Visor de documents PDF lleuger
Comment[es]=Visor de documentos PDF ligero
Exec=epdfview %f
GenericName=PDF Viewer
GenericName[ca]=Visor PDF
GenericName[es]=Visor PDF
Icon=icon_epdfview-48
Name=ePDFViewer
Name[ca]=ePDFViewer
Name[es]=ePDFViewer
MimeType=application/pdf;
Terminal=false
Type=Application

I mean heck lxpanel didn't even find my xterm there's got to be an app to convert this stuff somewhere

[dasein]

compiz is sort of looking like a gnome addon so far...

Actually, it's a window manager all its own. It's not at all clear to me why you'd want to try to run both.

Take a look here: http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php?title ... 2FBeryl.3F

[bw123]

compiz is sort of looking like a gnome addon so far...

Actually, it's a window manager all its own. It's not at all clear to me why you'd want to try to run both.

Take a look here: http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php?title ... 2FBeryl.3F

Heck I guess just because I can I don't know. Yeah compiz is doing it's thing okay, but it sure isn't a window manager the way fluxbox is. I will probably end up sticking with fluxbox, just wondered if anybody here knew about lxpanel menu.

[jw013]

compiz is sort of looking like a gnome addon so far...

Actually, it's a window manager all its own. It's not at all clear to me why you'd want to try to run both.

Take a look here: http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php?title ... 2FBeryl.3F

Heck I guess just because I can I don't know. Yeah compiz is doing it's thing okay, but it sure isn't a window manager the way fluxbox is.

I used to play around with compiz back in the day too. Sure it has a bunch of really nice visual effects that are not really useful, but eventually I gave up on it because for all its resource usage, it doesn't have enough useful window management features to replace a plain old window manager.

[dasein]

I used to play around with compiz back in the day too. Sure it has a bunch of really nice visual effects that are not really useful, but eventually I gave up on it because for all its resource usage, it doesn't have enough useful window management features to replace a plain old window manager.

Agreed, mostly. I found a couple of things to like about it long term (like its expose' equivalent--I forget what Compiz called it). But 90% of it was cute-once-but-basically-useless.

Have we hijacked this thread enough?

[bw123]

I used to play around with compiz back in the day too. Sure it has a bunch of really nice visual effects that are not really useful, but eventually I gave up on it because for all its resource usage, it doesn't have enough useful window management features to replace a plain old window manager.

If lxde had fluxbox I might try it, the lxpanel is very good except for the menu, and trying to use run command and entering just mc to run midnight commander locks my whole computer up instantly. Running it like 'xterm mc' works fine, don't know what's up with that.

[jw013]

I think the default wm in LXDE is openbox, but IIRC one of the stated design goals of LXDE was to be as modular as possible. You should be able to simply replace openbox with fluxbox by editing a session file or something.

LXDE has more or less started an entire DE from scratch, so some of their components might not be as polished as others. If the run dialog is borked, try alternatives. I don't use DE's because I like to pick my own components. My favorite run dialog back when I used one was gmrun (it's a standalone app that can be used in any DE or with any WM. Just map it to Alt F2 or whatever your preferred shortcut is and you'll be all set). Nowadays I just use my terminal with a full featured bash shell too as my run dialog

[bw123]

I think the default wm in LXDE is openbox, but IIRC one of the stated design goals of LXDE was to be as modular as possible. You should be able to simply replace openbox with fluxbox by editing a session file or something.

Now that might be interesting, I'm trying to learn as I go and kind of find stuff that will work together but it's tricky. I'm getting too much stuff on here, like vlc wanted qt4 so I went ahead, then compiz wants gnome-themes so I gave in. And I can't tell that either one is using them at all, actually removed qt4 yesterday and vlc is just fine without it, and without pulse, gstreamer, etc etc etc

I think lxde might have a good idea to keep things simple, makes finding problems a lot, uh simpler.

[dasein]

LXDE is really just a set of loosely integrated widgets that run in Openbox. As the title of this thread implies, many of the widgets that make up LXDE are... well, buggy. (There's just no other word for it.) The file manager in particular has traditionally had some horrendous problems that historically made it basically unusable. I installed LXDE on a 10+ year-old machine and almost immediately found myself replacing the LXDE file manager (pcmanfm) with Thunar (the file manager from Xfce).

I'm content with KDE for everyday use, but I could imagine trying to hack something together from *box, plus tint2 for a panel and maybe Thunar for a file manager.

[bw123]

Just in case someone else has the same issue, I found a nice little package called menu-xdg, which creates the right .desktop files, and also merges them into another file, so that it's easy to include the whole menu from fluxbox on lxpanel's menu altogether in one swipe. Also you can add individual items pretty easily. It is a nice set of scripts, and it wasn't too hard to make it work. You need to install menu-xdg, and then run #update-menus to get it to do it's thing.

I tried several different ways of adding the debian menu items to lxpanel's menu button, which I understand is using some kind of freedesktop.org cross-platform idea, instead of package 'menu' that I understand now may be proprietary to debian. I think the freedesktop way sounds real interesting, but you know, I got to have my xman and my goofy eyeballs ok?

One way is to edit the file /etc/xdg/menus/lxde-applications.menu and add this in an appropriate place:

Code: Select all

<!-- The Debian menu -->
  <Menu>
    <Name>Debian</Name>
    <MergeFile>debian-menu.menu</MergeFile>
    <Directory>Debian.directory</Directory>
  </Menu>

I put it right above the line that says -- Accessories submenu -- near the beginning of the file.
What this does is cause lxpanel to insert debian-menu.menu as a menu item called 'Debian' and everything is nice and neat under a heading of Debian > Applications. Not too bad, kind of buried though... and there is duplication of the apps that already have an entry.

Another way I like is make a new subdir named /etc/xdg/menus/applications-merged and copy the debian-menu.menu link into it. This makes a menu that is more integrated because lxpanel is already setup to look for files here and merge them, still a lot of duplication, but I think I like it better this way. Now I can have all my apps back on my huge old menu again, and xman is right there where it should be. After removing the file, it seems that just having this subdirectorypresent causes lxpanel to read the right file, a little odd but no bother really.

Also I tried copying individual .desktop files from /var/lib/menu-xdg/applications/menu-xdg into /usr/share/applications this makes a new menu item named "Other" with the apps in it. Might go this way, a little more easier to find things. I think this way might get broken possibly if an older app is upgraded and certain filenames or locations change, we'll see.

The scripts are in /etc/menu-methods they could probably be edited to better integrate the apps into desktop-style categories, but I will leave that for someone else.

[misfire99]

I don't find anything other then little children saying "I don't want to eat my pees." The complaints are very shallow. It doesn't have a gui to setup my whatever. You got to be kidding me. If you want guis and hand holding use KDE or run Ubuntu or both. I dislike them both so it should suit you just fine. I dislike gui's, I want human readable text files. I like the command line. Having to click on things is being stuck in mac land hell. But you know to each his own. Most people use windows because they don't know any better. So if you have castoff the yolk of Micro and Soft you know that the *nix world is much better. No other OS has as many window managers then Linux. If you don't like one then try another. If you don't like any of them learn to write your own. You can use the code from the parts you do like to make your own WM. Then somebody that doesn't want to eat their pees will complain about the one you wrote.

In the old days, like a decade or so ago, cpu power was expensive, memory was expensive, storage was expensive. Now adays I pay less then a quarter of what I paid for a ten meg hard to get a 500gig drive. I can buy memory with the change that falls out of my pocket when I pull out my keys. And the CPU in my laptop has exponentially more power then what was in the Apollo that put men on the moon. So is there really a need for stripped down window mangers? If you have a box that is more then ten years old throw it away and get a new one. It's worth it. I've thrown away all my MFM drives.

And by the way I like LXDE but I also like fluxbox but I use Gnome and I am waiting with baited breath for Gnome3. It's sounds very interesting. And to close I will quote Linus T. on KDE 4 "Oh my god what a disaster."

[jw013]

In the old days, like a decade or so ago, cpu power was expensive, memory was expensive, storage was expensive. Now adays I pay less then a quarter of what I paid for a ten meg hard to get a 500gig drive. I can buy memory with the change that falls out of my pocket when I pull out my keys. And the CPU in my laptop has exponentially more power then what was in the Apollo that put men on the moon. So is there really a need for stripped down window mangers? If you have a box that is more then ten years old throw it away and get a new one. It's worth it. I've thrown away all my MFM drives.

Most window managers are pretty light anyways. The bloat people talk about in GNOME and KDE comes from all the other stuff in the environment. I think metacity and kwin would be fairly boring and bare without the rest of the DE, and it's that other stuff that is bloated enough to drag down even relatively powerful machines. Not everyone has the money to buy the latest hardware just to waste cpu cycles on useless graphical effects. Meanwhile other window managers traditionally used without DE's can do so much more than either of metacity and kwin can.

Also, it's "peas"

[bw123]

I've thrown away all my MFM drives.

I could sure use a spare mfm card for an old pair of st-225 drives I put the stupid thing in backwards about 5 years ago and the magic smoke came out.

[tuxracer]

LXDE is still the ABSOLUTE WORST DE In Debian!

I tried to print something in Chrome and it's just showing 'processing' but I cannot cancel the print jobs in any way.

There's nothing showing up in Printers whatsoever.

What a POS!

[confuseling]

1) Stop using it.

2) Keep using it, be quietly annoyed, but don't keep posting these 'updates'.

3) Be branded a troll.

Choices, choices...