Now that LXQt is a thing, is LXDE officially abandoned as a desktop environment? I personally like GTK more than Qt, and LXDE is also lighter on resources, especially since most Linux apps are GTK, which LXQt would have to use memory to load the libraries for. Is there any chance that LXDE could continue to get support? Otherwise, how likely is it that it would be forked and continue to be developed for like Unity was?

Failing all those, are there any actively developed desktop environments that use GTK and are as lightweight as LXDE?

  • Ephera
    4•3 years ago

    The official communication from the team behind LXDE/-Qt some years ago, was that LXDE would comtinue to be maintained. There is also still prominently the Raspberry Pi Foundation which develops their custom PIXEL desktop, based on LXDE.

    However, LXDE is GTK2. It won’t work with high-res screens, nor with Wayland. So, in its current form, it will eventually go the way of the Dodo.
    You should also mind that many applications these days are GTK3, so you won’t really get a memory overlap with LXDE there.

    And they decided to port to Qt instead of GTK3, because they found Qt to be lighter (and easier to work with etc.).
    A currently developed DE pretty much has to be GTK3 or Qt5 (or another maintained toolkit), meaning they can’t really be as light as LXDE on GTK2 (unless they drop features or optimize it really well).