Switching to LXQt for better performance [HOW TO]

[IPXFong]

I love KDE Plasma it's beautiful and functional but it is fairly resource intensive and tends to bog down on the PineTab2. If you don't need the features, switching to LXQt can make things feel a lot snappier. The installation is pretty straight forward but it doesn't work exactly as the documentation suggests it should. So, let me lay it out for you.

First install LXQt with the command :

Code:

sudo pacman -S lxqt

There are a bunch of packages that contain lxqt, the system will ask if you want to install them all, hit enter to accept. Once the install completes, got to the KDE network configuration. Choose your main Wi-Fi connection and, under the Wi-Fi Security tab, Save this password for all users. (There's probably a better way to do this but this was the first solution that worked so I ran with it ;-D) Now, logout and choose LXQt Desktop from the drop down menu at the bottom of the login screen. LXQt doesn't set the screen rotation correctly for landscape mode so go to the App menu and choose Preferences -> LXQt Settings -> Monitor Settings and under the Advanced tab set the rotation to Right. Hit the Save button and you should be good to go.

Hope this helps!

[KelsonV]

That works great, and it's so much faster than Plasma!

Do you know how to rotate the touchscreen input to match? https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=18500 only has info for Sway.

[TomZa]

Hi thanks for the hint.

Tried it today. It is a lot faster. But I ran into some problems.
Before I invest time can you give me your findings.


1)   I saw in " LXQt" configuration a menu entry "KDE system setting" but in the monitor section of these settings the "automatic rotation"
      is missing (there is one in KDE Plasma Wayland. WOrks quite well ) Did you get an automatic rotation working?

2) Are you using the touchscreen. It performs poorly, a least with std. config. Any howtos or findings on your side?

3) Are you using LXQt in wayland mode?

4) Are you using SDDM as a login manager or do you start LXQt directly in "single user" mode. (I got some SDDM issues)




Again Thank you, Cheers,
Thomas

[KelsonV]

I got the touchscreen rotated in LXQt (on X11), based on the sway thread I linked to earlier. I just had to locate the X11 way of doing it and figure out which package xinput and xrandr were in!

This installs xinput and aligns the touchscreen with the display.

Code:

sudo pacman -Sy xorg-xinput

xinput map-to-output 'pointer:Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen' DSI-1

Edit: I did finally get it to run on LXQt session start!

1. Put the xinput line in a shell script and made it executable.
2. Go to LXQt Settings>Session Settings>Autostart and add a new entry to the global list called "Rotate Touchscreen" pointing to the script.
3. Check the box for "Wait for system tray"

[pakman]

I got the touchscreen rotated in LXQt (on X11), based on the sway thread I linked to earlier. I just had to locate the X11 way of doing it and figure out which package xinput and xrandr were in!

This installs xinput and aligns the touchscreen with the display.

Code:

sudo pacman -Sy xorg-xinput

xinput map-to-output 'pointer:Goodix Capacitive TouchScreen' DSI-1

Edit: I did finally get it to run on LXQt session start!

1. Put the xinput line in a shell script and made it executable.
2. Go to LXQt Settings>Session Settings>Autostart and add a new entry to the global list called "Rotate Touchscreen" pointing to the script.
3. Check the box for "Wait for system tray"

Great tip! You can enter the command directly in the Autostart entry rather than using a script, if you escape the spaces in the pointer string rather than quoting them, like this:

Code:

xinput map-to-output pointer:Goodix\ Capacitative\ TouchScreen DSI-1

[KelsonV]

I finally got around to setting up a Network Manager app on LxQt. nm-tray compiles and runs just fine (so far), and I was able to get the AUR package to build on the PineTab2 by adding aarch64 to the arch= line in the PKGBUILD file.

Code:

arch=('x86_64' 'aarch64')

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nm-tray