[I made an overdue Subject header change.]

Quoting fsmithred (fsmithred@???):

> I did try both of those, and we clearly have different tastes. My first
> impressions of LXQt are that it's as pretty as IceWM (pretty ugly) at
> twice the ram, but at least it has graphical configuration tools that are
> easy to find. I know it's still young, so I've promised to give it another
> chance. I liked lxde and used it for a while.

To be clear, I haven't tried LXQt at all. I've only recently heard of
it, when I was preparing to speak about LXDE to someone and (as I try to
do when I have time) double-checked the status of the project and found
to my surprise that it had been EOLed.

In retrospect, it's not that surprising that they gave up on gtk+ 3.x
and switched to Qt. I've heard a great deal of dissatisfaction over the
years about gtk+ being a horrific kludge -- which isn't surprising given
that it was yanked indelicately out of The GIMP and declared to be a
C-based new rival to C++-based Qt.

Qt was then proprietary, and it was deemed important to create a fully
open source DE to compete with KDE. This is why GNOME was cobbled
together in a hurry. All of that has now been changed: Qt is GPL; gtk+
is LGPL -- which means that the toolkits have now swapped roles about
which one is proprietary-friendly. But one thing has not changed: Qt
is still reported to be miles better to work with, and IIRC also
requires less porting work when there's a new toolkit release.

I gather that the Razor-qt project was faltering for various reasons, so
after the LXDE devs had favourable results experimenting with Qt 4, the
two DE projects decided to merge and what resulted was LXQt (on Qt 5).
Which as you say is brand-new.

It's hardly surprising that it hogs more RAM than IceWM, because what
doesn't? IceWM is a blessedly sparse WM, not a DE. (I'm sure you know
this; I'm recapping this for readers.)

Having no actual experience with LXQt, I still would not be too quick to
dismiss it as not good-looking, as in my experience much depends on
theming and your own customisation. This is why, e.g., Linux Mint's
various flavours all look, out of the box, a great deal nicer than the
corresponding *buntu flavours they're based on: The Mint people simply
put a lot of work into providing small aesthetic tweaks -- which any
local administrator could also do.

And also, as you say, with LXQt being new, the default being not yet
great is to be expected.

My own preference is for sparse window managers with no DE -- and I
generally keep coming back to Window Maker.

But, for friends who insist they want a DE, I have traditionally tried
to suggest LXDE or Enlightenment. (I mentioned LXQt only because LXDE
is going away, and being replaced with it.)

If you wish to see how beautiful Enlightenment can look and how fast and
lightweight it can be, have a look at Bodhi Linux,
http://www.bodhilinux.com/ . (Bodhi Linux uses a fork of Enlightenment
E17 called Moksha Desktop
(http://www.bodhilinux.com/2015/04/28/introducing-the-moksha-desktop/).

Also FWIW:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/kicking.html#distro

> The first systemd-free version of Refracta had openbox with lxpanel and
> spacefm. I could see going back to that, but I have to answer to users,
> and it looks like we're sticking with xfce for the time being. It really
> is quite workable and should not be put in the same category as Gnome or
> KDE. I don't have the patience (or hardware resources) for those two.

I'm fond of XFCE. I still have it on a Mac G3 (PowerPC) iBook -- no
kidding. But I don't trust the large amount of common codebase XFCE has
with GNOME -- which I see as a big problem. (Just my opinion, guaranteed
worth only what you paid for it.)