This would make LXQt look and feel so much more modern, IMO.
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The GitHub link you provided looks good (covering installation on Lubuntu 22.04 LTS), but to publicize the theme you like, you could always write up a review of it on this site, telling us your release, how you installed it (instructions are on the page you provided, but did they work perfectly for you? what tweaks/changes did you do post-install etc) so others can enjoy the theme as you did.
If we (as in Lubuntu) did package & adopt it (we can only use packages from Ubuntu repositories), that would take time, where a post (by you) on this site or thread could benefit existing users, and not just users for future releases.
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I literally just installed it, so I don’t have a review of it other than having a good first impression. I’ve been looking for an LXQt’s variant of MATE’s Brisk or Xfce’s Whisker menu, and am happy to have this installed.
It looks way more modern compared to the current one, and it is familiar enough to people who were used to using Windows XP or 7’s Start Menu, which is what drew me to it in the first place.
Installing the build dependencies was almost exactly as it was provided on the GitHub page, but I had to change the last 2 for Lunar (not sure for 22.04/22.10):
sudo apt install git build-essential cmake qttools5-dev liblxqt1-dev libkf5windowsystem-dev libqt5x11extras5-dev liblxqt-globalkeys-ui1-dev liblxqt-globalkeys1-dev
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(I noticed you already replied to my response on Reddit, but for the sake of others who read stuff here on Discourse, here’s the current Wing Menu situation in Lubuntu.)
We’ve actually looked into Wing Menu in the past. It looks really nice. Sadly, we did hit a showstopper when looking into packaging it.
In order to legally use software at all, one must either own the copyright to it, or the software must be licensed to the user by the copyright owner. This is why most software has a license agreement - it’s what gives you the legal permission to use the software. Even Ubuntu is licensed to the end user - the license simply (among other things) allows the user to use the software however they want to, and allows redistribution of the software with some restrictions. [1]
The problem here is, if software does not have any license, that means you cannot use it for any purpose. You can’t assume that it’s free because it has no license - the only safe thing to assume is that all rights are reserved. Using or redistributing that software is copyright infringement.
And this is where things get problematic with Wing Menu. Either by design or by oversight, the author of Wing Menu failed to apply any license agreement to their code. Maybe they’re still working on it and don’t want any distros to package it until it’s done, or maybe he just forgot. Or maybe he doesn’t intend to release Wing Menu as free software. Who knows. Currently, the only safe thing the Lubuntu developers can do with Wing Menu, is to leave it alone. We can’t redistribute it or package it without taking a legal risk, and so we don’t.
Technically, even your use of Wing Menu counts as copyright infringement. Whether you choose to accept the risks involved with that is your own choice, but we aren’t willing to take that risk ourselves. Plus it’s against Ubuntu’s development rules to include unlicensed software in the Ubuntu archive, so even if we were risk takers, we wouldn’t be able to include it in Lubuntu.
Yes, this is an unfortunate situation. However, there’s hope! There’s a bug report on Wing Menu already, asking for the author to specify Wing Menu’s license. If the author does choose a suitable open-source license for Wing Menu, we will definitely be taking another look at it.
[1]: For those who read “restrictions on redistributing Ubuntu? What do you mean?”, it’s not as scary as it might sound. I’m talking about things like the restrictions present in the GPL (things like “you can’t keep other people from redistributing this if you give them a copy”), as well as the trademark restrictions around Ubuntu’s branding. To the best of my knowledge, all of the official Ubuntu flavors, and probably most of the various Ubuntu remixes out there are perfectly legal.
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