Razor & LXDE-Qt Desktop Projects To Merge

Developers behind the lightweight Qt-based Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt desktops met up at KDE's Akademy 2013 conference. During the annual KDE developer conference, the two lightweight desktops decided to merge their efforts around LXDE-Qt.

With Razor-qt struggling in terms of manpower and their v0.6 release falling behind, they've decided to do the 0.6 release and after that pick the best pieces of Razor-qt and LXDE-Qt and merge them to one. Developers from both projects are on board and they hope it will drive development manpower behind this new lightweight Qt desktop, but the LXDE developers have yet to decide if they will become a member of the KDE project.

From yesterday's announcement, "Our plan is to cherry-pick the best parts of Razor and LXDE and include or port those to LXDE-Qt. Other components will be ported straight from GTK code or rewritten from scratch. In the end, we want to offer the best possible experience while reusing as much code as possible. It will not be an easy process and as always, we welcome anyone who wishes to help, be it with development, translations, or general feedback...As for Razor-qt, we will release a final 0.6.0 package for those who are happy with the desktop as it is. We are starting the release process now and it will include several additional improvements from the Razor/LXDE fusion. After the release, there are no further plans to maintain the Razor-qt tree on its own. We will all be working on the LXDE-Qt repositories and we are looking forward to everyone joining forces and working on LXDE-Qt."

The LXDE code for right now is being hosted on GitHub.