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New Qt Based Desktop Environment

Posted by Unknown on from the this-is-not-the-gnome-you-were-looking-for dept.

aglider writes "Phoronix has an interesting piece of news about a new emerging desktop environment. And it's Qt based! From the project home page: 'Razor-Qt is an advanced, easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-Qt also works fine with weak machines.' Someone has already tagged Razor-Qt as 'a KDE ripoff.' What we have so far is version 0.4, ... and ... a number of easy ways to install and test it on a few main Linux distributions. Maybe time has come for something really new in the desktop environment arena almost completely occupied by GNOME and KDE." The project site has a few screenshots, and the source is available under a mixture of the GPL and LGPL. It looks pretty pedestrian in its current form, but then XFCE wasn't much to look at in its early stages either.

2 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Rip-off? by Lemming+Mark · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Indeed - it looks like it's reusing a load of artwork from KDE *which is good*. With open source there's no reason not to slot in existing professional artwork straight away in a new project. They're even planning to make it easy to contribute their patches to common code back to KDE, so they're even being actively co-operative, which is always nice to see.

    If they come up with something that looks nice and is lighter-weight than KDE then I might want to install it on my ancient netbook or in virtual machines. KDE is still my preference on my desktop.

    Qt is a nice toolkit and it's good to see more development based on it. There's also the Trinity Desktop Environment, for folks who want a KDE-like lightweight desktop - it actually *is* KDE 3, further developed. It looks like (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Trinity#Trinity_Build_Dependency_PKGBUILDs) that's based on Qt 3, whereas Razor-Qt can presumably use newer Qt versions from the start. Variety is nice, it's all cool.

  2. Window close/minimize/maximize buttons by psergiu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why the heck all the Linux Window managers are copying Windows 95-XP with the placement of the window close/minimize/maximize buttons ?

    Also - why are all the GUI shortcuts With Ctrl and not Alt or Meta ?

    Is Windows THAT GOOD so the purpose of all those GUIs are to become a perfect copy of it ?

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