[xstreamos-discuss] LXDE desktop progress and issues

Valrhona valrhona at gmail.com
Mon Sep 15 11:51:02 CEST 2014


Gabriele et al:

I decided to take the plunge and switch over to running the LXDE
desktop (since it's more complete than the XFCE) as my default
workstation.

Overall, it runs well:

Firefox, terminal and PCManFM are the things I use most, and basically
everything works. The NVIDIA driver is great. Flash has problems with
YouTube and some television networks (ABC in America), but otherwise
is fine for many sites, such as Vimeo. It would be nice if the update
could be made to work, but it's not terribly critical). git, LaTeX
(TexLive), and Eclipse with various plugins are fully functional, as
well.

Everything else I run in VirtualBox, which successfully works for
Ubuntu 12.04, Linux Mint 17, Windows XP and Windows 7 (tested so far).
So overall things are quite functional.

Nevertheless, there are a few things are left that I would very much
like to see fixed:

1. No mixer for the sound control. I don't know how to adjust the
audio, but at least it basically works with the onboard sound card.

2. Don't know how to change the screensaver and power management
options for screen blanking, which I would like to disable.

3. In general, I think that it would be good to have a functioning
menu editor. Right now, if you edit the menus, you get different
results from either the menu bar or Cairo, and various applications
are missing from both. This is something that should be straightened
out, just because it's hard to configure particular applications.

4. It's not so easy to set up a printer. I have an HP connected over
the network, so if someone could actually get HPLIP to work, that
would be fine, but the standard CUPS is sufficient, as well.

5. I think there is something wrong with the USB driver, but probably
is an Illumos issue. I occasionally have a keyboard that just stops
working, then I have to plug it back into a different port, and it may
work again. Same for the mouse. I also have  USB-based external DAC /
amplifier (i.e. sound card) that occasionally works, but then has
hissing noises. This worked fine for years under OpenIndiana.

6. The previous issue I mentioned with lastpass and the password vault
secured by two-factor authentication with a YubiKey may just be a
FireFox issue; I had the same trouble in Linux before an update to the
latest version, so this might not be important after you do the next
Firefox update.

So after playing with this for a few weeks as my default workstation
OS, I think XFCE is still a bit more polished and usable, but LXDE is
also adequate. I agree with you that it's better to just have a
fully-developed Desktop environment, instead of several half-baked
ones, so if you focus on LXDE and can solve all of the above issues, I
would be very happy!

Thanks again for all of the hard work in making this OS available to us all.

Best,

Peter


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