The niche LXQt fills for me is a light desktop environment that looks and feels "normal". For example, I just (like ten minutes ago) put Debian LXQt on an older Thinkpad for my kids to use, because it exposes things nicely and still is light enough to not be frustrating. It will also keep my wife from yelling at me if she has to help them with something when I'm not around. It's a good balance of light and usable.

Does KDE not do the same for you? It was pretty strange back in the Plasma 4 days, but since Plasma 5 it's felt extremely "normal" and unsurprising, like Windows 7. I'm not a regular user so it's just my surface impression.

It's improved its heavyweight nature, but it's still a lot heavier than LXQt is. I use it on my main machine and love it.

I think a ton of people got disillusioned with KDE when they first introduced Plasma and got obsessed with tablets. Remember the awful kidney bean?

That was certainly the last time I used it. I just took another look and it seems like they have improved it a lot. But... I dunno, maybe they had their Digg moment.

This looks exactly like I would like a simple "modern Windows 95" UI to work, which I think is really what most people want.

I can accept that, thanks for sharing! I agree, things like XFCE and MATE need quite a bit of mucking around to actually look "normal".

I also quite like IceWM on Antix for this kind of experience.

I think XFCE is one of the most "normal" desktop you can get, but I suppose that depends on that is considered normal nowadays. It has a bar with a menu, a list of open windows, and notification/status section. It has a desktop where you can place folders, files and shortcuts. It's context menus make sense.

It's not perfect but with a few simple tweaks (most of which are scriptable via xfconf-query) they can be fixed. Instead of trying to maintain a desktop across my machines, or over rebuilds, I just run my script and I'm done.

The biggest gripe I have with it is the file choose/save dialog. It's default focus isn't the filename field (like WTF). Let's say you're going to save a file. When the dialog opens and you start to type, it starts to filter files in the current directory. It's totally f*ucking stupid, extremely annoying after the second time you encounter it, and not easy to change in the settings. You need to get under the hood.

> XFCE and MATE need quite a bit of mucking around to actually look "normal"

That's an odd statement. Sure XFCE may not be as polished or consistent, but most distros will ship a pretty consistent desktop.

Mate on the other hand received plenty of UX work from Red Hat and Canonical back when it was still Gnome 2 and you still have all the themes and styles from that era, to me it doesn't get more 'normal' than that. (OK, they changed the accent color to green and there is apparently no easy way to change that, but I'd say that's the only step back in that regard.)

I am 100% convinced that GNOME 2 was one of the greatest UIs of all time. Its UX was incredibly simple yet beautiful, and GNOME 3 and 4 instead feel gimmicky and disconnected from reality when compared to it. Mate really deserves more love nowadays.

My theory is that GNOME (basically RedHat) were concerned about software patents. I cannot think of any other reason why they would make it so different to the mainstream and thus less intuitive for most. IMHO it is not an improvement. Luckily Ubuntu have made it slightly more normal.

Around the time of GNOME 3, everybody was doing big changes to their desktop experience. There must have been something in the air that said let's screw up desktops. This was when Windows 8 was putting tiles everywhere (but you know, not actually everywhere) and OS X was ruining things in a more subtle way I can't remember.

Everyone involved has talked extensively over the years about what they think about the desktop UI experience there is no need to add complexity.

I guess by normal I just mean what my family members might be used to coming from Windows. XFCE is much better in that regard but the GNOME2 workflow that MATE seems to stick to is not quite easy to pick up from them, so it involves either configuring panels myself or getting a hold of the MATE Tweak tool to change the layout to Redmond or whatever.

I agree on IceWM; it was not hard to make it give that feeling of, "Oh, so it's just a normal computer, then." JWM was another of the super-light window managers that could do that pretty well with the right setup.

Have you looked at Ubuntu-Mate? Its 21.10 release has the makings of the best one in years. I'll concede that it has taken a bit of time for development to start coming together but now there seems to be a momentum and I've yet to see a version of the desktop that looks better. I wish more people would look at this version of Mate, with its best foot forward rather than some of these basic ones with absolutely no polish applied.

I've been using Ubuntu Mate since the day it came out and I am on 21.10. But I can't put my finger on anything that points to increased development momentum. Could you point me to what I'm missing?

Yes, I want something that looks and feels like Qt (I simply like the design language) with the Qt app ecosystem, but which sheds a metric ton of stuff compared to KDE that only serves to make me endlessly tinker with it.

Last time I tried Openbox I found configuration horrible (XML, really?) compared to 'traditional' WMs like fvwm, mwm, cwm e.t.c. If LXQt automates things like application lists then I guess that would permit a more usable experience. Plasma is not a thing on some non-Linux OSes atm so LXQt would be a decent alternative for those.