[lubuntu-devel] Suggestion - do a user interface refresh for the 23.10 cycle?

[Aaron Rainbolt]

This is a possibly silly idea I just wanted to bounce off y'all and see 
what you think.

Lubuntu's theme has remained more-or-less unchanged since the switch to 
LXQt. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but there are several things 
I'm noticing that make me think that it may be a good idea for us to 
change Lubuntu's look and feel next cycle.

For one, an integral part of our UI is the Breeze theme. Breeze is not 
designed for LXQt. It is designed for KDE. The two are rather different, 
and this has occasionally shown up in technical problems. One 
particularly good example is 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kconfigwidgets/+bug/1992196, 
which bit us right near the end of the Kinetic cycle. A change in a part 
of KDE that wasn't even the Breeze code itself caused Breeze to break in 
LXQt, but not in KDE. Rik Mills was able to bail us out of that 
thankfully, but we very nearly changed theme to Clearlooks (I believe) 
when that happened.

Another example of this problem has recently showed up as a problem with 
LXQt and Wayland. A matter of hours ago, a discussion around a new 
Wayfire plugin for LXQt happened on the LXQt Wayland bug report. This 
appears to be the closest LXQt has ever gotten to having a decent 
Wayland solution. However, according to Marcus Britanicus (the developer 
of the new LXQt Desktop Shell Wayfire plugin), there is a bug where can 
accidentally drag the entire desktop background in certain instances. 
This bug only occurs with Breeze enabled, and it appears that the bug is 
Breeze's fault. (See 
https://gitlab.com/wayfireplugins/lxqt-desktop-shell/-/issues/1 for more 
info, particularly the now-crossed-out "Breeze and pcmanfm-qt --desktop" 
part.)

Given that Breeze can sometimes break or exhibit broken behavior like 
this, I don't think continuing to use it in Lubuntu is going to be in 
our best interest in the future. There are other themes that work. If 
Breeze is for KDE, perhaps it's time for us to use a theme that is for 
LXQt. It may reduce our workload and panic level (imagine if the bug 
with kconfigwidgets had hit closer to the release day!), and may also 
improve our ability to work toward eventual goals like Wayland.

If we're going to change theme anyway (which is part of my suggestion), 
it might look nice to do a whole UI refresh, changing the overall 
look-and-feel of the OS in ways we feel work well with the new theme. 
Ubuntu Desktop appears to be constantly having small UI refreshes, and 
to some degree Kubuntu does this too. Lubuntu has stayed with the same 
basic UI for years.

This is just a thought, and it's not something we probably want to or 
even can do until next cycle. But I thought I should mention it since.

Thanks for taking a look at this, and let me know what you think!

-- 
Aaron Rainbolt
Lubuntu Developer
https://github.com/ArrayBolt3
https://launchpad.net/~arraybolt3
@arraybolt3:lubuntu.me on Matrix, arraybolt3 on irc.libera.chat

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