Wednesday, October 14, 2015
LXQt 0.8.0 Released With Full Qt5 Support, Various Improvements
LXQt is the Qt port and the upcoming version of LXDE (a lightweight desktop environment, used by Lubuntu for instance), which resulted from the merge between LXDE-Qt and Razor-Qt projects.
After five months of development, LXQt 0.8.0 was released yesterday, bringing quite a few interesting changes, including full Qt5 support, a new lxqt-admin component, two new themes themes and more.
"In the five months since the release of LXQt 0.7.0, we have seen a surge of interest and several new developers have joined us. Collaboration with other desktop environments has been very promising and we are very excited to be able to pick up new KDE Frameworks libraries to replace custom, duplicated and often sub-par functionality".- LXQt 0.8.0 release announcement
LXQt 0.8.0 ships with full Qt5 support (and the Lubuntu daily PPA already provides packages built with Qt5) however, Qt4 is still supported. For the next release though, Qt4 will be "dropped entirely", mentions the release announcement.
With this LXQt release, PCManFM (Qt), which was the first LXDE component to use Qt, has received support for single-click to active items, drag & drop support on the desktop, Ark archive manager integration as well as improved readability in icon view. Here's a screenshot with the latest PCManFM (Qt) 0.8.0:
Another component that has received some useful changes it the LXQt Panel, which now supports reordering taskbar buttons, "urgency" hint and also, OSS is now supported in volume control, if available.
Here's a screenshot featuring the latest LXQt Panel along with one of the two new themes (Dark Alpha - see panel theme):
Other changes in LXQt 0.8.0:
- new component: lxqt-admin. This brings an optional set of basic admin tools such as configuration for date & time as well as users and groups;
- two new themes: Plasma Next (based on KDE Plasma Next theme) and Dark Alpha;
- improved multi-monitor support;
- lxqt-config-randr been replaced by lxqt-config-monitor;
- support for RGBA transparency if compositing is available;
- lxqt-powermanagement: Improved compatibility with systemd/logind;
- Compton integration (if available, disabled by default);
- added support for setting a default UI font;
- lots of performances improvements and bug fixes.
Here are screenshots with the new LXQt admin tools and the new Monitor configuration tool:
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| LXQt admin configuration tools for date & time / users & groups |
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| LXQt Monitor confg tool |
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| LXQt Monitor confg tool |
Testing LXQt
If you want to try LXQt, you'll find packages for quite a few Linux distributions on its homepage. Note that it will probably take a while until the packages are updated to the latest LXQt 0.8.0 (currently, there are only Arch Linux and Ubuntu - well sort of -, for the latest version)
Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 users: the Lubutu Daily PPA provides development LXQt packages which are built daily, so most components should be up to date (I've used this PPA in Ubuntu 14.10 to test the latest LXQt). However, since the PPA provides unstable packages not only for LXQt, but also for the standard LXDE, I won't add exact instructions for how to install it (especially since reverting the changes is pretty complicated). But if you want to test it and you know how to revert the changes in case something goes wrong, simply add the PPA and install the "lxqt-metapackage" package - that should provide everything you'll need to run LXQt.
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