LXQT on RPi 4 with kwin

Desktop Environments Lxqt
1

@sradjoker came up with LXQT on a RPi 4b with kwin instead of openbox.
With Konsole, Kate, and Dolphin. Strictly speculative, but this seems snappier and smoother on a RPi 4b than a full blown KDE Plasma install.

Clean
clean

Dirty
Dirty

All I need to do now is work on the icons for Dolphin.

Pudge

7 Likes
2

Nice :upside_down_face:
Why not go full KDE? (i mean, dolphin / konsole / kate installs most of it anyway :rofl: )

3 Likes
3

It is not as snappy or fluid on the Pi. I have an 8 GB pi and 128 GB uSD so I don’t care for extra 50 MB RAM and 200 MB space the new apps take, but prefer a fluid experience.

5 Likes
4

Yeah…but @pudge using kwin as well, so it should be same in snappiness department to full kde?

1 Like
5

Let me try and experiment with both and check the difference myself.

2 Likes
6

On my Ryzen 7 2700 system, I would agree with full KDE. That is what I have on the Ryzen daily driver, and what will stay there.

On a RPi 4b or perhaps older x86_64 hardware, I think this is an improvement performance wise.

Like I said, strictly speculative.

Pudge

2 Likes
7

It will be good to have benchmarks. I can do a comparison of these four DE setups:

  1. Openbox
  2. LXQt with Openbox
  3. LXQt with KWin
  4. Plasma

The metrics would include:

  1. RAM
  2. Install Size
  3. General Experience on the Pi (will be subjective, including stuff like snappiness etc.)

If you want me to test and log anything else please let me know. @Pudge @keybreak

2 Likes
8

I guess in terms of de / compositor outside of resource usage only subjective snappiness can be measured, not sure what else there is to check :scientist:

9

One more thing would be boot time.
Would systemd-analyze be the best way to go about this?

edit:
I used the time from user authentication in login manager to when the desktop starts for this.

2 Likes
10

And another cool part about using kwin on lxqt - you can still use the kwin scripts like bismuth.

I’m a fan. It’s a fun little setup.

3 Likes
11

Nice to see another adoption of lxqt/kwin - I have used the combination for a while :slight_smile: welcome to the exteme tinker club

1 Like
12

Is this your github repo? The setup looks great btw. Do you have more screenshots?

13

Yes it is my repo. No I don’t have more screenshots.

1 Like
14

Are you copying all the themes and configs to the root user? Is there a way to do it for a normal user?

15

No - I am copying to /etc/skel

This way when I create the user the files is used to initialize the user.

I use mc - and different colorsheme for root and user - which is why there is a special folder for root - it only contains the midnight commander root theme.

The usr folder is copied to /usr - contains some minor tweaks for lxqt theme and the sddm theme used.

16

What is mc here?

17

Midnight Commander - a terminal filemanager - a clone of the famous Norton Commander.

The commands can be scripted like

#!/bin/bash
pacman -S git
git clone https://github.com/fhdk/lxqt-kwin
cd lxqt-kwin
pacman -Syu --needed - < $PWD/Packages-Desktop
systemctl enable NetworkManager
systemctl enable sddm
systemctl enable firewalld
cp -r $PWD/etc/. /etc/
cp -r $PWD/usr/. /usr/
cp -r $PWD/root/. /root/

Then create your user

useradd -mUG lp,wheel,network,video USERNAME
passwd USERNAME

reboot or start sddm

1 Like
18

How do configure bismuth or krohnkite without a Plasma DE? From what I can tell from both GitHub pages, both require Plasma system settings to initiate and config. Would be great to be able to do this especially on a pi4/400.

Thanks

19

It’s been a while since I did it, but if I recall I just installed the extensions from the AUR. And there should be something in the settings about scripts I believe. If you can’t figure it out, I can try again later this afternoon to look into it again.

Edit: Here’s where I did it

20

I think I got it.

Thanks again