I migrated over from Ubuntu Xenial (w/Unity) to Lubuntu 19.04 a couple of weeks ago. Having an Ubuntu flavor that is based on LXQt is a breath of fresh air. Overall it’s been great so far. There were a few minor issues that are worth mentioning though:
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The installer did not seem to play well with pre-existing partitions, and would simply quit about a tenth of the way through the install process. I worked around this by cloning my Xenial install to another drive and then re-partitioning through Calamares. Could have just been an issue with my previous layout and not a universal thing.
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Qlipper failed to start sometimes after logging out and back in again. I worked around this by replacing the autostart entry for Qlipper with a short script that waits five seconds before calling it.
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The gnome keyring often fails to unlock after logging out and logging back in again. I think this is an issue with sddm. I planned on migrating to passwordstore anyway (which I did using the pass import tools), but I’m sure some people prefer gnome keyring daemon, so it could be worth looking at.
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GTK applications don’t pick up on font antialiasing and hinting settings for some reason. I worked around this by installing xsettingsd and adapting my preferences to the config file for that program. GTK applications now look great.
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‘Non-existent temporary files’ would display on the desktop when logging in (see here: https://github.com/lxqt/pcmanfm-qt/issues/944). I worked around this by using an updated version of pcmanfm-qt and the related libs imported from the Stable Continuous Integration PPA (see here: https://launchpad.net/~lubuntu-ci/+archive/ubuntu/stable-ci).
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I don’t think the Spice VD Agent and Geoclue Demo applications should be set to autostart by default (nor do I think that the lubuntu-desktop metapackage should have spice-vdagent as a dependency). Regarding Spice in particular, there are many people who have no use for remote access to virtual machines, and it just seems like a niche feature that does not need to be running or installed by default.
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Synaptics still has much better support for touchpad configurations than libinput (OOTB at-least). So I had to switch back to that for handling my trackpad. Works as well as it always has. This brings up a final issue, which is that a lot of the settings for both the touchpad and standard mouse do not seem to stick. This is workable for me as I have some things configured for synaptics and xinput anyway, but I assume this might cause trouble for other users.
Otherwise it’s been smooth sailing, and LXQt feels really mature at this point. I plan on sticking with Lubuntu, and hope that the upgrade process is smooth between releases. I read that Wayland support is supposed to be fully implemented by the next LTS release, and I pray that things go smoothly (and also that users who still prefer X can continue using it without issue at that point).
Kudos for the wonderful implementation of LXQt!
P.S. I forgot to mention that compton is still a great lightweight compositor, but that the comptonconf tool could reveal a few more settings to the user. While one can obviously change the config for compton manually, revealing the vsync settings would be particularly useful for those who switch between Nvidia and Intel integrated graphics, as using one of the opengl options for compton’s vsync resolves tearing issues on most Nvidia GPUs. The default configuration is solid when simply using Intel integrated graphics though, which was a nice surprise.