Hello, I have installed Lubuntu 19.10 64 bits in Brazilian Portuguese and I realized that, unlike 18.04 LTS that was completely translated into Brazilian Portuguese, 19.10 still has many words that have not been translated either in the menu or in the settings. They are still in English.
In a few months we will have the release of version 20.04 LTS and the ideal is that it is 100% translated, so my question and willingness to help.
Is there a dedicated translation website? Or should I translate directly on the LXQT website? https://weblate.lxqt.org/
Thank you SO MUCH for your willingness to help. If there’s anything I want for Lubuntu (besides being functional and beautiful, which it already is!) is for it to be accessible to everyone. Translation is an important part of this.
Practically, to deal with this, there are sort of 3 things that need to be translated to call Lubuntu fully complete:
Upstream components, such as LXQt and the various applications. This should be done upstream for sure as it will have the added benefit of applying to a wide variety of distributions rather than just Lubuntu. If the upstream component doesn’t have some means of dealing with translations, they should, and this should be filed as a bug against their upstream project (example: SDDM).
Native software packages within the Ubuntu repositories, such as calamares-settings-ubuntu and lubuntu-default-settings which should probably be dealt with in Ubuntu proper. We should probably set this up in Launchpad Translations.
Pieces that we are creating ourselves, such as the website and blog (and with it, the release notes), the manual, and the wiki. We have used Weblate for this in the past and need to set it up again.
We have created a Globalization Team to help deal with these things. @Roberalz, @hmollercl, and @apt-ghetto are all members and can probably offer some insight on how you can further help with things.
Oh, and another thing: you’ll find that when looking at the status page on the LXQt Weblate for pt_BR, that they’re doing pretty good, but some of these are realtively new changes. We don’t usually have new versions of LXQt in Ubuntu until there are new releases in LXQt and they’re a little slow on the releases, so that may be why you’re not seeing them in Lubuntu.
Yes we are aware Lubuntu 20.04’s release is coming up (as well as being extremely aware Lubuntu 18.04.4’s release is tomorrow) and the 20.04 UI freeze date is even closed; ie. March 19, 2020 (FocalFossa/ReleaseSchedule - Ubuntu Wiki).
If they are, have you filed them? on launchpad for us, or upstream for LXQt?
That is a lot of work, and would require, I believe, a larger team and amount of time available for Lubuntu volunteers, to create, and continue to maintain, and advance results faster than just using upstream’s LXQt. More than current resources are I believe.
Qt has been in the press lately because of their desire to generate money and forcing Qt LTS users to pay for the use, which has generated some discussion on the LXQt forum. Most of that won’t impact LXQt, but I was reminded of how much work it is tracking & dealing with upstream bugs as versions of toolkits/libraries relied on change. This work is currently handled by LXQt; work we’d have to do ourselves if we forked LXQt.
Personally I see a lot of refinement in my (Lubuntu) desktop since it was first introduced in 18.10 (LXQt 0.13.0), and all features I need are included. No software is perfect, including LXQt, but it’s my choice for my primary DE.
I honestly don’t get too caught up on version numbers. I think it is more important to note how active development for the project is. Just because they don’t issue a release with a version bump doesn’t mean changes are not carried into the versions we have in Lubuntu. We don’t necessarily carry every change but when a bug gets reported and there is a patch from upstream we try to incorporate it. Case in point, take a look at libfm-qt, many of those additional patches have been implemented since the last release.
I can’t say that I necessarily agree. Our team is not really large enough for that. We would effectively reduce the size of the team working on the desktop environment. When our cycles permit, I think contributing to the already active upstream project is the best choice. Everyone that uses the LXQt desktop environment gets to benefit that way.
Others mentioned thoughts I had, but in response to this particular item: LXDE is dead. They haven’t released anything in aeons. The last few LXDE releases of Lubuntu ALSO featured the same versions except that they didn’t feature any additional changes because there weren’t any changes committed. LXQt is extremely active on the other hand.
That said, how has working with LXQt translations been going?
Translations: go submit them upstream! I would love to fix this personally but I lack the necessary knowledge. You are in a perfect position, though.
Connection editor: this will be fixed in 20.04 and quite possibly backported to 19.10.
Screensaver: this has nothing to do with LXQt, first of all. They don’t really recommend any specific screen saver, just as they don’t recommend a specific window manager. However, xscreensaver is the most reliable and secure solution for screen savers. The upstream developer is a little adamant about their logo, but we’re improved things slightly within the limits he provides.
Well to add to this, LXQt is 100% translated upstream in my language (and checking version history of a few of the strings, the translation was done over a year ago), but Lubuntu (20.04) translation is more than spotty, so what gives?
I used Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Galician and Spanish in LXDE, using the fallback feature. Now I see that LXQt has no native fallback support and I have asked Lubuntu Team to solve the problem.
You can benefit from the fallback too, from Brazilian Portuguese to Portuguese from Portugal, but it need to be fixed or implemented natively in Qt/LXQt.
