> Maybe LXQt will be great, may be not, but at this point it reminds me of Ubuntu 10.10 which, IMHO, was as refined as Ubuntu (or any linux distro at the time) could be, and then they just decided to throw all that maturity and refinement away and start from scratch.

I don't know if you know this, but LXDE is GTK2 based, so the decision to "throw all that maturity away" isn't quite the same here. Ubuntu bet on convergence that never happened, Lubuntu has to eventually accept that GTK2 is getting long in the tooth. And since the LXDE maintainers moved to the LXQT project, QT it is.

EDIT: Also, given the choice between GTK3 and QT, the latter is the less resource hungry IIRC, at least when sticking to the basics.

I hoped for a very VERY long time that someone would fork Gtk2 - mainly looking towards the MATE devs. Sadly it never happened, Gtk2 had a ton of warts, but it also was for the longest time the most stable toolkit API, the closest to Windows' win32 in terms of stability and something you could target and expect it to be there in basically any desktop environment :-(

Ubuntu 10.10, huh.

I'm not old enough to have experienced that, but I can say that we have the same thing happening with 16.04

They had it almost perfect and decided to throw it all out.

History does repeat itself...

Not old enough? Well this makes me feel old even though I'm not. I'm 22 and my first version of Ubuntu was 8.04.

I'm guessing they got into using linux later in life. Not all of us messed with linux when we were 12 ;)

Matter of fact, I was using linux when I was 12! Actually installed ubuntu myself.

However, I wasn't into it to the extent that I could follow the linux distro culture. Don't even remember the version now; must have been 10 or 11.

There was also the fact that I had limited access to the internet in the early days (that's just how it was in India).

I was just sick of trying to make pirated software work (including windows), so was looking for something I can just download and run.

I do remember that I liked how easy it was to install games, compared to my windows desktop.

Only now, that I am familiar with software development cycles do I understand how stupid it is of Ubuntu to discontinue fully featured, polished software.

For example, Mac has changed so little over the years (haven't personally used it much), which probably is the reason why it's so much more mature as compared to linux DEs...

P.S. I am 19

When I was 12, it was all windows 3.1, IBM OS/2 and Solaris for the cool cats.

When I was 12 it was C64.

When I was 12 the VIC-20 was released but I rocked a TRS-80 Model 1.

Acorn System 1

this thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_calculator#/media/F...

If that makes you feel old, I must be ancient.

Still made me feel a billion years old as I am pretty sure I had quite a few Warty Warthog cds around at one point.

CDs? I had 7 floppies for Doom. And I bought a sound card!

When I was 12, we were messing up with the Amiga on geek friend's house, ProTracker had just been released, playing Defender of the Crown on the school PCW computers and doing Z80 programming on my own Timex 2068. :)

>but I can say that we have the same thing happening with 16.04

Yes, 16.04 (unity 7) is peak desktop for years to come. Nothing else works quite as well for me. Luckily, you can use unity 7 with 18.04 without too much friction.

What do you use as a file manager? Ubuntu's built in one lacks the basic functions that one might expect from Windows Explorer or the Finder (e.g., the ability to rename multiple files, open folder as path in terminal, mount SMB shares, see file previews).

With 16.04, I'm using the default bundled nautilus version. With 18.04, I think nautilus lost some functionality. I haven't switched to 18.04 yet though. So I don't know how serious it is. I don't use the file manager too heavily. You can switch to nemo, dolphin or caja if it works better for you. Not sure how nicely they all play with Unity. There was a patched nemo version for Unity 7.

Worth noting that Dolphin devs have disabled it's use as superuser, ... I can't comprehend why. Krusader is my fallback option.

Lubuntu's 'PCMan File Manager' does all those and some more except for renaming multiple files.

'rename' [1] is a good way to do it anyway.

[1] http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/prename.1.ht...

I wished I could install unity on my daily driver; solus.

Budige is great, but it's not as mature as untiy 7.

I feel like what they are describing is what xubuntu already is....still I'd love to see some more power give to the DE

Because the GTK version is no longer maintained by upstream, the community was not interested on porting to GTK3 instead they will use Qt that is a better in quality and not controlled by GNOME toolkit.

So the "Blame" is not in Lubuntu community but LXDE

> very, very customizable

I don't know where you're getting that. I like LXDE well enough. The only laptop I have running Linux runs Lubuntu. I would not call it "very" customizable. I can't easily rearrange the menu (which I blame the retarded .desktop file standard for), I can't add my own menus (to my knowledge), I can't change the application menus to be mac-style top-of-screen menus like I could in KDE 3, etc.

I agree that LXDE isn't the first choice when you're thinking about customizing your desktop (check out reddit.com/r/unixporn if you're into this sort of a thing).

I meant that from a point of view of comparing it to others like gtk3, unity, cinnamon etc for some specific features that I find useful.

Of course, not all distros will lend themselves to all types of customizations easily and customizability, at least to some degree, is relative.

With that in mind, yes, maybe I should tone it down to 'customizable,' instead of 'very, very customizable.'

I'm not really in to ricing like /r/unixporn is, I just think my tools should be simple and flexible so that I can align them with my workflow.

For instance, why do we need one single global menu with all the apps categorized according to a .desktop file? That's overcomplicated and restrictive garbage.

Here's a simpler alternative: let me place as many panels on the desktop as I want, let me place widgets on the panels, let one of those widgets be a button that presents a menu-ized view of a folder structure. Now I can have as many menus as I want, with whatever layout I want, and organize my application launchers as best suits my workflow.

Without commenting on your suggestions, I'll say this, I am not that big on menu based launchers.

I used to use Gnome Do as my primary launch tool. Now I just use a shortcut (Windows Key + Space Bar) for the 'Run' dialog (usually found by Alt + F2) and I know the first few chars of my favorite tools after which they autocomplete.

For everyday use, it's hard to beat the speed and simplicity of that.