buster lxqt w/ openbox

I've been running the Jessie-based BunsenLabs "Deuterium" on my "test" computer, patiently waiting for the Buster-based BL "Lithium" release. On a whim, I decided to take a look at Debian Buster LXQt to see how it might do on that computer.

I started out by downloading  debian-live-10.0.0-amd64-lxqt.iso and getting that onto a flash drive. The live session booted up on two of my machines, but I couldn't get into the live session using my "test" computer; booting with the Graphical Debian Installer option worked fine with that hardware, however.

Buster LXQt ships with a standard desktop setup and a nice collection of apps, including Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, PCManFM-qt, the LibreOffice suite, Audacious music player, qpdfview, LXImage, and QTerminal, among many others.

I found xfce4-screenshooter in the menu along with another screenshot tool, ScreenGrab, which seems to be a nice app. ScreenGrab gets the job done, and also it stays open between screenshots, unlike xfce4-screenshooter.

Here's a shot of PCManFM-qt, which offers a nice, commander-style split view. I found some items in the Trash. How they got there is a mystery; I didn't intentionally put them there!

I added Openbox, installed a handful of other packages, and did a heck of a lot of tinkering and tweaking -- so much, in fact, that I didn't do a good job of taking notes on everything that I did, which is something that I'm normally very meticulous about. Debian Stable doesn't really give the user a great out-of-the-box experience, but it's excellent for the "do-it-yourself" user who wants to put together a nice, customized system.

A couple more shots of my Openbox desktop, showing QTerminal, ScreenGrab, my tint2 setup, and my Openbox menu:

I like a vertical panel along the left side. For Openbox, tint2 gives me just what I need. For the LXQt sessions, I was able to get a decent left-side vertical panel -- not perfect (I wasn't satisfied with the config options available for the LXQt panel), but it'll do.

As a former CrunchBang user and fanboy, my original plan was to stick with BunsenLabs (perhaps the best Debian-based Openbox distro out there right now) for this computer, and to do a quick-and-easy installation of "Lithium" once it came out. As things have turned out, I'm happy with this Buster LXQt (with Openbox) setup, even though it took a lot of work to get things the way I like them. The thing is that while BunsenLabs is better than "straight" Debian for installing and getting to work right away, I'm never quite satisfied with the default BL setup (same goes for any distro, really!), so either way I was gonna spend a lot of time tinkering and tweaking.

Seems to me that LXQt still needs more polish, especially when it comes to GUI configuration options, but it isn't so bad, overall. It's a decent solution for those who need a light-weight desktop environment for low-performance hardware.