New Qt Based Desktop Environment

aglider writes "Phoronix has an interesting piece of news about a new emerging desktop environment. And it's Qt based! From the project home page: 'Razor-Qt is an advanced, easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-Qt also works fine with weak machines.' Someone has already tagged Razor-Qt as 'a KDE ripoff.' What we have so far is version 0.4, ... and ... a number of easy ways to install and test it on a few main Linux distributions. Maybe time has come for something really new in the desktop environment arena almost completely occupied by GNOME and KDE." The project site has a few screenshots, and the source is available under a mixture of the GPL and LGPL. It looks pretty pedestrian in its current form, but then XFCE wasn't much to look at in its early stages either.

Video

[ens0niq]

Razor-qt desktop environment on Ubuntu 11.10:

http://youtu.be/n6Ro1Qc4UaE [youtu.be]

Article (hungarian):

http://hup.hu/cikkek/20111219/razor-qt_qt-alapu_gyors_desktop_kornyezet_telepitese_ubuntu_11.10-re [hup.hu]

Re:Good or Bad thing?

[RedK]

I think his point was how QT is much more than just a UI library. It has support for primitive types, it has a socket API, it has low level operating system abstraction. It's basically a portable framework for making rich applications with the least possible amount of platform dependant code. Quite off topic.

Re:Good or Bad thing?

[Kjella]

Well first of all this isn't Qt, it's a system built using Qt like KDE. Secondly, I don't know when Qt was ever just a GUI toolkit. It's trying to be a full on standard library - not like stdlib, but like Java, C# etc. covering GUI, file systems, networking, databases, multimedia, threads, collection classes and so on - basically you're supposed to be able to write fully functional applications without ever using anything but Qt classes.

KDE is.

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE is ported to Windows. Check http://windows.kde.org/ [kde.org] for the installer. It works sort of like synaptic, where you pick the applications you want and it deals with dependencies for you.

Some things in it work better than others, and you'll have to download a lot of Qt and KDE dependencies at first. The applications generally work pretty well but aren't all feature-complete compared to their *nix counterparts (but Kate and IOslaves work! aweosme.)

I'm not sure about the state of Plasma itself (the desktop, widgets, etc.) but it's been available for a while. I don't think Kwin is available, so it will still use the normal Windows window management (ick)

Re:Good or Bad thing?

[msobkow]

Qt is a full application portability toolkit, not just a collection of widgets. It's Neuron Data's Open Interface concept reworked as open source and delivered on steroids. Not a new concept, but a very powerful one, and not to be confused with a basic widget library like Motif of GTK+ that only deal with widgets and have no concern for portability at their heart.

A completely different animal, despite it's lineage.

As to people claiming this new GUI is a KDE rip-off: KDE is a collection of applications and a desktop/window manager based on Qt. KDE is not the underlying Qt technology on which it's built, but an application of that technology.

Qt predates KDE by many years, and was originally delivered by Trolltech as a hybrid GPL/commercially licensed product before eventually being bought out by Nokia and released as fully LGPL open source when they opted to abandon the tiny revenue stream of Qt/Windows users who were paying for licenses in favour of wider adoption of the toolkit.