[scrollaway]

Yah I got what you were saying. It just annoys me that this is the state we're in.

I share your love for UX and UI development. For what it's worth, the LXQt project could really use people like you dedicating a few hours now and then on drafting app designs, filing UX issues, etc. If you're ever interested, file an issue on the tracker[0] and cc me (@jleclanche) on it.

https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues

[acchan]

How do you feel about elementary OS? [0] They spend a lot of effort on UX and it's the project I personally believe has the most chance to push Free Software to a wider audience, but on the other hand it's yet another project contributing to fragmentation.

I'm not sure where they stand wrt XDG, but I bet if you asked them for help with UX and designing stuff, they would love to collaborate.

[0] https://elementary.io

[scrollaway]

I like that they're doing some good UX work (although it's really just copying apple's HIG... and style), but again it's not very interesting to have a group of people working on apps, when the apps themselves look like crap on any other desktop.

On LXQt, I made sure there was no NIH. All the apps that came out of LXQt were lightweight alternatives to bloated stuff from KDE and were "in scope" of the desktop environment. Whereas Elementary includes an Email client.

To put things in context: An email client is office software. It's such a burden to maintain that Mozilla dropped support for theirs (Thunderbird), despite its massive userbase.

People work on what they want to work I suppose, but we're talking about apps that are never going to be used outside of that one particular desktop. That one desktop out of god knows how many, since everybody is working on their own piece.

Are there really so many different ways to do a lightweight tabbed text editor with syntax highlighting in GTK, that Scratch, gedit and Leafpad all need to exist? Or can we admit there's a problem?