Dev1 Galaxy Forum / Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (fredbird67) — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 16:37:44 +0000

Hmm...I just created a Devuan derivative with the Xfce desktop environment the other day (formerly based on Debian, but now fixin' to be based on Devuan due to the political nonsense Debian has engaged in as of late, according to Bryan Lunduke), but due to the IceWM edition of it not being ready yet (I've been busy with lots of other stuff), I haven't gone public with the release of it yet. Now I did notice that the ISO is a bit bigger than on the previous edition (almost 3 GB vs. a little over 2 GB previously), so I need to go back and make sure it didn't also install LXQt on me. Nothing against LXQt, I just prefer Xfce, although I have thought about creating a combined LXQt/Openbox edition.

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (Altoid) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:17:12 +0000

Hello:

Lomax wrote:

... how to get rid of the cruft installed along with LXQt ...

You can start by first making a list to check if there is any.
eg:

$ apt list | grep installed | grep -i lxqt

Best,

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (Lomax) — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:44:47 +0000

You'll need to add excalibur-proposed-updates to your sources.

Thanks, I did this and installed xfce-polkit, after which I could remove both lxqt-policykit and mate-polkit. Unsure how to get rid of the cruft installed along with LXQt though.

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (Lomax) — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 13:24:53 +0000

On my Excalibur laptop, which was upgraded from Daedalus, I have policykit-1-gnome 0.105-8+b1 installed. xfce-polkit, lxqt-policykit and mate-polkit are all absent. I log in via slim and XFCE works perfectly.

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (fsmithred) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 20:57:58 +0000

This could use some testing. You'll need to add excalibur-proposed-updates to your sources.

    * Fork for Devuan, just for excalibur so xfce has an polkit GUI agent.
 xfce-polkit_0.3+v20220621-3~excalibur1 (excalibur-proposed-updates): started binary build for amd64 on amd64-build03

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (EDX-0) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:36:23 +0000

so there is a project that implements a command line policykit auth interface intended to build custom polkit agents with scripts.

https://github.com/OmarCastro/cmd-polkit

it has examples to use rofi and zenity as GUI frontend, so it should be possible to build an auth agent with any toolkit frontend we want, will check the project out in depth later, compile and give it a try.

edit: there is an implemented polkit agent using cmd-polkit https://github.com/cobaltgit/pkmenu

i will look into compiling cmd-polkit through the week and see if i can take the idea of pkmenu into something more flexible that can support multiple graphical frontends, all i need is someone who got a good idea of how to do packaging cuz i do get confused with the myriad of helpers for deb packaging that don't work for me.

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (rbit) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 15:29:13 +0000

I'm always logged in to an LXQt session

On the slim login screen, press F1 to switch login session
it's safe to remove lxqt-session (which will in turn remove lxqt-policykit), because, curiously, the offline desktop installs both lxqt-policykit and mate-polkit

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (yohno) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 10:16:57 +0000

My ceres seems OK for now but the test PC with excalibur, upgraded from daedalus today, judged gnome polkit untrusted so it is disappeared now. Just installed polkit mate per recommendation. Thanks a lot....

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (abower) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 09:45:47 +0000

It was a bit unfortunate in the timings, that trixie was released with the old gnome polkit removed but the new xfce-polkit package left out by the freeze: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/xfce-polkit

The xfce-polkit also seems quiet upstream...

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (Lomax) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 09:02:15 +0000

Hm, here the default slim login puts me into an xfce session.

And I'm always logged in to an LXQt session. Could this discrepancy perhaps have something to do with me installing on a Ryzen system with a Vega iGPU?

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 06:41:40 +0000

mostly as a frame of reference with respect to an earlier post, this is from a stock daedalus install, xfce desktop:

devuan@devuan-pc:~$ aptitude why lxqt-session
i   task-xfce-desktop             Depends  slim | lightdm                                          
p   lightdm                       Depends  lightdm-gtk-greeter | lightdm-greeter                   
p   x2gothinclient-minidesktop    Provides lightdm-greeter                                         
p   x2gothinclient-minidesktop    Depends  mate-desktop-environment-core                           
p   mate-desktop-environment-core Depends  mate-notification-daemon (>= 1.26) | notification-daemon
p   cinnamon                      Provides notification-daemon                                     
p   cinnamon                      Depends  network-manager-gnome                                   
i A network-manager-gnome         Depends  policykit-1-gnome | polkit-1-auth-agent                 
p   lxqt-policykit                Provides polkit-1-auth-agent                                     
p   lxqt-policykit                Depends  lxqt-session                                            
devuan@devuan-pc:~$

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (EDX-0) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 06:09:12 +0000

makes sense, if anything it should install the policykit-1-gnome as that does provide the polkit-1-auth-agent that would integrate the best with gtk and the network-manager-applet, however my guess is that apt resolved the dependencies getting a list of which packages provide polkit-1-auth and choose the first available option by alphabetical order, were the lxqt agent not available it would had gone with the mate agent...

edit: i just noticed that the policykit-1-gnome agent was removed in trixie because it is unmaintained upstream as stated here https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=990271

so the real solution is to install the mate-polkit-bin package as that WILL integrate with a mainly gtk environment without pulling the lxqt session NOR the mate-session package

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (rbit) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 03:10:38 +0000

Hm, here the default slim login puts me into an xfce session. But there are several lxqt packages that got installed, including lxqt-session. These can probably all be safely removed with apt remove lxqt*

I think, possibly, they got pulled in from network-manager-applet

aptitude why lxqt-session
i   task-xfce-desktop      Recommends network-manager-applet | connman-gtk | cmst
i A network-manager-applet Depends    policykit-1-gnome | polkit-1-auth-agent
i A lxqt-policykit         Provides   polkit-1-auth-agent
i A lxqt-policykit         Depends    lxqt-session

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (Lomax) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 01:43:04 +0000

Thanks. I used "Expert Install", without network.

Re: Latest Excalibur desktop installer forces LXQt?

dummy@example.com (ralph.ronnquist) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 01:37:34 +0000

Yes it does... I'll try it out to see if I get the same. Will take a little while though.
Did you install with or without network?