I’ve been updating the same system since the first version came out (3 laptops ago). I’ve gone through tons of problems, mostly minor, but a couple of real pains along the way. The last upgrade to 19 from LXDE was not proper at all (it was my doing, didn’t use the Lubuntu distro, just Ubuntu via terminal ) and Ubuntu update didn’t quite know what I had I think… and now I’ve ended up with a Kubunu / Lubuntu hybrid.
It’s all working nicely ( XDG / KDE / GTK / X11 / GNOME ) but it’s taken days to keep things from conflicting or overwriting settings on reboot. So my question is: Does Lubuntu 19 come with KDE/Plasma or am I crazy?
…that said, in 18.10, which was the transition from LXDE to LXQt, we had a note in the manual about the additional packages you’d probably want to remove as the remnants of the old LXDE system. tl;dr you will have extra stuff if you upgrade from LXDE Lubuntu to LXQt Lubuntu.
Also, since we are working hard to eliminate any GTK dependencies and to be Qt as much as possible, we have some apps that come from the KDE world. For example, Trojitą is a KDE application. It has no KDE requirements, though. Another example is K3B. See the K? People start getting nervous that means they’re getting the entire KDE desktop. Nope. Even looking at the dependencies, you see some KF5 (KDE Frameworks 5) libraries, but if you go through all the dependencies of the dependencies (see apt-rdepends), you’ll see no actual KDE desktop environment components are included. Even with Bluedevil, which is based on a Plasma applet, it installs some Plasma libraries, but not what we think of as Plasma. You can thank KDE/Kubuntu for this because a while back they made it so you could use pieces of KDE without taking the whole thing.
Haha So my next question, does Lubuntu come with the KDE System Settings manager (screenshot)? Because I originally started using a couple of other settings managers (primarily LXQT settings) and had everything nice, but a few things were annoying so I tried KDE just to see if if that was causing an issue, and as soon as I changed some things there several changes took place, one which cost me 2 hours is FOCUS STEALING PREVENTION. every keyboard hotkey I created would open the app behind other windows. Needs to be set to NONE. That wasn’t even a thing in LXDE/LXQT.
Another thing KDE did was stop my sys notifications (without me even touching anything in that setting), but that I care less about for now. Another day another problem.
LXQt has its own configuration center. Many of those components will plug into the similar thing that comes with KDE Plasma (“System Settings”). In any case, you’re clearly running KWin as your window manager. Switching back to Openbox might make things more normal, but KWin is nice and isn’t necessarily resource intensive if you tone down all the special effects. One of the biggest contributors to LXQt uses KWin.
Regarding having changes set on you, I’m not surprised that a new set of programs to change behavior would result in changes since they will come with their own default configurations. Maybe trim out what you don’t need?
One thing I’ll say about KDE: it does everything. Seriously. There’s an option for anything. You just got to find it. That’s one of its biggest problems. I am happy every time I suggest something to one of the LXQt developers based on Kubuntu experience (we use it at work) and they point out how messy and obtrusive their GUI ultimately is. It’s just too much.
I’ve got everything perfected now. rsynching the whole thing, because if anything happens to this stack of madness I’ll lose it. Finally got the package manager sorted, and notifications. It’s a total hybrid… had to reinstall/reconfigure numerous things. but worth it as long as it remains stable as is. yes I prefer kwin with opengl, but some things are using lxqt/compton (i think). anyways thanks for the advice!
QUESTION: what’s the default software center for lubuntu? (Discover or ‘Software’?)
Lubuntu LXQt includes both Muon (which is like Synaptic) and Discover (which is like the Ubuntu Software Store). Discover is sort of the “easy button” and lacks some advanced features, including the ability to install command line programs.
So my next question, does Lubuntu come with the KDE System Settings manager (screenshot)? Because I originally started using a couple of other settings managers (primarily LXQT settings) and had everything nice, but a few things were annoying so I tried KDE just to see if if that was causing an issue, and as soon as I changed some things there several changes took place, one which cost me 2 hours is FOCUS STEALING PREVENTION. every keyboard hotkey I created would open the app behind other windows. Needs to be set to NONE. That wasn’t even a thing in LXDE/LXQT.
