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New Qt Based Desktop Environment
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.
I for one welcome new razor-qt overlords.
Seriously though, completion is the best, and its really time to teach Gnome folks the lesson.
"It looks pretty pedestrian in its current form, but then XFCE wasn't much to look at in its early stages either."
Wait. Featuritis will make it grow, soon... ;)
And say what you want about Windows: Windows interface is to this moment unsurpassed in it's functionality and simplicity (at leat the classical 95/2000 on which KDE is based). OSXs finder with all it's annoyances and ,,so shiny/no content,, is, unfortunately gaining terrain with copycats (god save us).
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Razor-qt desktop environment on Ubuntu 11.10:
http://youtu.be/n6Ro1Qc4UaE
Article (hungarian):
http://hup.hu/cikkek/20111219/razor-qt_qt-alapu_gyors_desktop_kornyezet_telepitese_ubuntu_11.10-re
Someone has already tagged Razor-Qt as 'a KDE ripoff.'
Oh no, someone call the police! Someone is ripping off an idea from an open source project! We must stop this "open" madness!
I think his point was how QT is much more than just a UI library. It has support for primitive types, it has a socket API, it has low level operating system abstraction. It's basically a portable framework for making rich applications with the least possible amount of platform dependant code. Quite off topic.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Well first of all this isn't Qt, it's a system built using Qt like KDE. Secondly, I don't know when Qt was ever just a GUI toolkit. It's trying to be a full on standard library - not like stdlib, but like Java, C# etc. covering GUI, file systems, networking, databases, multimedia, threads, collection classes and so on - basically you're supposed to be able to write fully functional applications without ever using anything but Qt classes.
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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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If you can't make a point without insulting something then your point isn't that good to begin with.
At the very least learn about whatever you are insulting so you don't look stupid and we could take you seriously. I use OS X and Linux and I like my OS X desktop just fine. I don't want widgets on my desktop. The ones I do have are out of my way on the dashboard. I do not use "mission control" and I don't have to. I just click on my Applications icon on my dock as I always have and I continue business as usual. I can press command-spacebar and spotlight will help me find my relevant emails, files, and web pages visited and or googled. I can define "workflows" with applescript that perform some of my repetitive tasks that I do on a daily basis. Workspaces is nice to organize my windows. This desktop does what it is suppose to do and that is to stay out of my way.
I don't know why people obsess so much about the desktop. I spent more time in my editor and ssh terminal than I ever do on my desktop. Geez you'd think we have better topics for a fanboy war.
Anyway on the topic at hand which is "KDE is just a windows ripoff". I have to agree that KDE does its best to emulate the Windows experience on Linux (warts and all). However the real question is this a bad thing? I don't think so, since I'm not forced to use KDE if I don't like it.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
This might be a really stupid question, but has anyone ever ported any of these UI's (KDE, Gnome, etc.) to Windows?
Now before you tell me off for being stupid, there would be a good reason for it - anyone that prefers *nix and has to use a windows machine (say at work) can at least get some of the familiarity by using their favourite GUI. For those of us, like myself, who have tried to switch from Windows so many times but got cold feet because everything is so unfamiliar and different, it'd be a great way to familiarise with it.
Sure, there's a lot more to *nix than just a different UI, it's almost a different ethos, a different way of working - but every little helps.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Lets hope this is the start of a whole new set of Desktop Environments, and I don't mean the bloated, needlessly flashy, touchscreen optimised, BS that looks like children's toys.(Yes KDE, Unity, Gnome I'm looking at you.)
It is the bloat that turns lean window managers into actual desktop environment. Take LXDE, it is basically openbox with a few panels. By the time you add a printing subsystem, notification subsystem, and all the other things that truly make up a desktop environment, then it is no longer so lightweight. It is not the eye-candy that makes KDE and Gnome so heavy, it is all the other services provided in the background.
"If you can't make a point without insulting something then your point isn't that good to begin with."
"At the very least learn about whatever you are insulting so you don't look stupid and we could take you seriously."
Interesting two sentences to write next to each other.
P.S. I confess that I even *like* the graphic appearance of Windows 95, but I guess that's just me getting old.
KDE is ported to Windows. Check http://windows.kde.org/ for the installer. It works sort of like synaptic, where you pick the applications you want and it deals with dependencies for you.
Some things in it work better than others, and you'll have to download a lot of Qt and KDE dependencies at first. The applications generally work pretty well but aren't all feature-complete compared to their *nix counterparts (but Kate and IOslaves work! aweosme.)
I'm not sure about the state of Plasma itself (the desktop, widgets, etc.) but it's been available for a while. I don't think Kwin is available, so it will still use the normal Windows window management (ick)
This is a consequence, which cannot easily be avoided. The only thing I'd wish for is a better modularization. The current desktop environments are close to all or nothing. You can drop the one or other service, but the minimal set is still huge and in my view very intrusive.
Look to [bunch of old OSes] - get something new already
Ummmmmm. Okay. If you're that desperate for something new, how about coming up with something new?
There's also something to be said for not fixing what ain't broken. New for the sake of new is why we end up with so many bugs, and pieces of awful, incomplete, crappy window managers like Unity and Gnome Shell being used in stable release versions of popular Linux distros when they are nowhere near ready for prime time.
which is totally what she said
I noticed applications built using QT cannot be automated fairly easily by users with tools like autoit... and that sucks. Or perhaps I'm mistaken what computers are for. I thought they were to automate difficult things into easier to use and re-use interfaces.
The GLib layer contains those abstractions in the GTK+/GNOME stack.
Windoze sucks!!!!
It is not intutative at all, it is not simple, and barely functional. Blow OSX all the crap you want, my mom can figure it out - it is unsupassed right now under version 10.6.x.
Look to NeXT, BeOS, Amiga, DragonFly, - get something new already. Look beyond the mundane. Linux people are to the point where they are hoping they can make their little linux box look like windoze. OOOOOOO - get windoze then.
I want a better OS and a better GUI - no more of the same old crap.
Parent should not have been modded down. He has some valid points and touches on key issues. Beating parent on the head with a stick is childish and does not improve the discussion.
I happen to disagree that OSX operations are discoverable by the novice. It seems to me by observing novices that Windows UP THROUGH XP was, with the exception of certain operations, extremely easily understood by novices. Reasonable people can disagree on this, but one thing they cannot reasonably disagree on. A huge portion of the population now has a reasonably good understanding of, and facility with, Windows. So it seems to me that sticking within the dominant desktop paradigm does have its advantages.
That does not mean it has to look exactly like Windows, or copy obvious details where Windows just flat blows it!
Qt is a full application portability toolkit, not just a collection of widgets. It's Neuron Data's Open Interface concept reworked as open source and delivered on steroids. Not a new concept, but a very powerful one, and not to be confused with a basic widget library like Motif of GTK+ that only deal with widgets and have no concern for portability at their heart.
A completely different animal, despite it's lineage.
As to people claiming this new GUI is a KDE rip-off: KDE is a collection of applications and a desktop/window manager based on Qt. KDE is not the underlying Qt technology on which it's built, but an application of that technology.
Qt predates KDE by many years, and was originally delivered by Trolltech as a hybrid GPL/commercially licensed product before eventually being bought out by Nokia and released as fully LGPL open source when they opted to abandon the tiny revenue stream of Qt/Windows users who were paying for licenses in favour of wider adoption of the toolkit.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
on Slackware 13.37
it seems to run okay (fast and stable), it makes a nice lightweight desktop, it wants to use Openbox to manage applications,
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RE: "P.S. I confess that I even *like* the graphic appearance of Windows 95, but I guess that's just me getting old."
me too, that why i run IceWM with rox-filer drawing the desktop icons and wallpaper = basic and lightweight, but still quite usable
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Never used a distro with E17, have you? :) the Enlightenment libs are designed from the ground up to be modular, and to allow you to pick and choose which parts of the system you want loaded, but even with bling effects (compositor) enabled, and stuff like dancing penguins on your desktop, it can still fit in less than 128MB of RAM. It's light-weight and responsive without sacrificing the eye candy or functionality.
And thanks to the modularity, it can be shoehorned into very low RAM configurations: I have seen it fit in less than 40MB of RAM without sacrificing the compositor, or any of the functionality most users expect from their desktop, just by unloading modules that you wouldn't need.
And say what you want about Windows: Windows interface is to this moment unsurpassed in it's functionality and simplicity (at leat the classical 95/2000 on which KDE is based).
What's so simple about having to reboot your computer every five minutes? You are talking about older versions of Windows, although you still need to reboot whenever you install or update anything whatever, unlike Linux.
What's so simple about having to reopen all your programs and documents after a boot? KDE opens to the same state it was in when you closed it, all open docs and apps are reopened. You can, of course, change this to mimic Windows.
What's so simple about the double click? Those of you in their twenties don't remember learning how, so it just seems natural to you, but it isn't. Back in the nineties when PCs first got Windows, the double click was the hardest part of teaching someone how to use a computer, and it's completely unnecessary. Your mouse has two buttons. KDE needs no double click. Of course, you can make this like Windows, too.
What's simple about Windows Registry? IMO they should have simply kept .ini files.
Windows is NOT simpler than KDE, and it is NOT more "user friendly." KDE is more than user friendly, it's user obedient. It does things the way you want it to, Windows insists on you doing it the Windows way.
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Neither does KDE force to run akonadi and nepomuk. You can disable them if wanted. Only some KDE applications demand those like now kdepim applications.
But KDE Plasma, KWin and other KDE applications do not force you to run them.
QT was in the mid 1990s being seriously proposed as the default widget set for Linux. Something like what Cocoa is for OSX or .NET for Windows. Yes, the idea was QT OS. LAMP would be the standard for 3 tier architecture and QT for 1 and 2 tier.
Then people went ballistic because of the QPL, Gnome started moving into that role with User Linux and Progeny. And today KDE is just a desktop environment but Linux GUI was a Suse, Turbo Linux, Caldera, Connectiva project at first with QT in a very prominent role.
Parent might have had points but "Windoze sucks!!!" doesn't help advance the conversation.
As for the advantages of familiar vs. better I think Gnome's comment was the best here, "You have a certain of difference points you can spend on your interface. Too different and people just hate it. So spend them carefully". The Windows interface made a lot of sense which is why even prior to KDE, Linux desktops sometimes had a windows feel. FVWM's FVWM95 was extremely popular with early distributions, RedHat even used to make that one the default.
Anyway with iOS gaining popularity, and OSX gaining popularity the days when everyone knew one or another interface are starting to pass. Further web based interfaces use entirely different toolkits and have entirely different paradigms. The computer monoculture is dying for the younger generation.
Qt predates KDE...
Does Qt have any relation to Quartz? Its the Q... and the t... makes me think maybe there was a story to be told there.
Does Google not exist on your planet?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Qt predates KDE...
Does Qt have any relation to Quartz? Its the Q... and the t... makes me think maybe there was a story to be told there.
Does Google not exist on your planet?
I am not inclined to entertain your ontological interrogative.
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