LXDE in Archlinux
LXDE (screenshots) is a great desktop environment. I felt in love for it in a few days, exactly when I discovered it.
It is based on Openbox, which is my favourite WM except for tiling ones. It includes PCManFM, which is by far the best file manager I’ve ever seen on a Linux environment, after KDE4’s Dolphin/Konqueror: I’ve been waiting for the multicolumn mode from OpenStep under Linux for years. I’ll talk with LXDE’s developers about it. LXAppearance provides an easy way to choose the GTK theme, icon theme and font. It is, AFAIK, the only graphical alternative to Gnome’s tool for those features. LXPanel works great, it provides exactly what I’m looking for and is light, still easy to configure. To name a few, icon-only window list, keyboard LEDs indicators (did you remember I use a EEEPC?), launchers you can manage just by selecting .desktop files (sooo better than Xfce). The session manager permits me to shutdown/reboot/suspend/etc., without using any display manager (I use x:5:respawn:/bin/su - gcarrier /usr/bin/startx). And it doesn’t depend on many libs: GTK2, DBus, HAL, FAM. There’s a simple NetworkManager alternative which is work-in-progress. For now, it only works with Debian-based systems (as it uses ifup/down scripts), but I got SVN commit access and will improve this very soon. Anyway, it will never follow the NetworkManager way and any advanced stuff should be done through a shell. But it manages ASCII/hexadecimal WEP keys, parts of WPA and is very easy to extend by customizing shell scripts. What really astonished me was LXLauncher, an enhanced replica of EEEPC’s default tabbed desktop launcher. Considering it, I could really provide LXDE to my grandma.
I wrote PKGBUILDs for everything today. For now, various TU maintain parts of it; I’d like to entirely maintain it as I’ll follow the developers very closely. And provide a lxde group to make it easier to install. You might want to use lxsession-lite instead of lxsession which is buggy. Last but not least, the Subversion repository contains nice apps to come.
8 Comments to “LXDE in Archlinux”
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In Aur many lxde package are orphan, maybe you can adopt them :)
Actually I can always put packages from unsupported to community and then adopt them. That’s something TUs can do without being polite, which make some users angry at them.
I see that you have adopted the lxde packages that are already in community, i have voted all the lxde packages.
I know that is a little bit “OT” but i have a little question :)
What happen to Romashka? There are many community packages that he adopted that are not up-to-date.
Sweet. I use openbox in gnome atm, but lxde looks like a great alternative. I’m going to have to give it a try.
Looks good! I want to replace gnome with this. Gnome seems to be munching on my ram these days, and although I have lots of ram…I don’t want a Gnome to get it! call me selfish that way!
Looks terrific!
I use Openbox, pypanel, and pcmanfm, so switching to LXDE may give me a more expedient solution so setting up a quick, pre-configured and light WM. I hope to see it adopted!
@Babets: I don’t know who he is, sorry. I finally adopted all LXDE packages :)
@iluvprogrock, @D3BR074: Do not except anything similar! The spirit is completely different, and there is no plan to “clone” Gnome, which is a complete desktop but also a great framework.
@Mistfit138: It seems to become more widely adopted. It is now the default environment of Archlive! We need fresh blood, as pcman, the main developer, will be much less available from now for professionnal reasons.
After some days with KDE4 i discovered lxde for me.
But there are some annoying issues (like hardly usable Lxpanel).
Maybe i did smth wrong, but i cannot see apps icons in task list. Just text with strange (closure?) icon. desktop pager is ugly.
Forums say to use pypanel or smth, but i want use native one.