After six months of development the new version of LXQt 0.17 was introduced developed by the entire LXDE development team and Razor-Qt projects.
LXQt is positioned as a lightweight, modular, fast and convenient continuation from the development of the Razor-qt and LXDE desktops, which has absorbed the best features of both.
For those who are unaware of LXQt, you should know that this is a free and open source desktop environment for Linux, the result of the merger between the LXDE and Razor-qt projects and which is positioned as an excellent option for low-resource teams or those who prefer to save resourcess, as the biggest improvement to LXQt is it provides a lightweight desktop and much more control than LXDE.
Main new features of LXQt 0.17
In this new version we can find in the panel (LXQt Panel) that added a mode of operation in the style of «Dock», in which automatic hiding is activated only when there is an intersection of the panel with any window.
In the file manager (PCManFM-Qt) in addition to the full support for file creation, we can also find that added buttons to Tools menu to create launchers and enable admin mode, which uses GVFS to move files that are not included in the current user rights, without obtaining root privileges.
Also highlighted is that it made sure all child processes are terminated during the end of the session, allowing non-LXQt applications to write their data at the end of the session and avoid hangs on exit.
In the power management interface (LXQt Power Manager), idle status monitoring for standalone operation and for stationary power is separate and added a setting to disable idle tracking when the active window is expanded to full screen.
In terminal emulator QTerminal and in the QTermWidget widget, five modes of displaying background images are implemented and a setting has been added to disable automatic quotes around data pasted from clipboard. Action after pasting from clipboard changed to "scroll down" by default.
It is also noted that thumbnail generation settings have been added to the LXImage Qt image viewer and an option to disable image size adjustments when browsing.
Of the other changes that stand out in this new version:
- The notification output system provides summary information processing about the notification in plain text form only.
- The translation work has been moved to the Weblate platform.
- A discussion platform has been launched on GitHub.
- In parallel, work continues on the release of LXQt 1.0.0, which will provide full support to work on Wayland.
- Improved selection of mixed file types with different MIME types.
- The location of the dialog for working with files is included.
- Restrictions on the size of thumbnails have been added.
- Natural keyboard navigation was implemented on the desktop.
- Efficiency of vector icon processing in SVG format has been improved.
- Added support for opening and extracting disk image data in the LXQt Archiver file manager.
- The window parameters are saved.
- Horizontal scrolling is implemented in the sidebar.
To know more details about the release of this new version, you can check them In the following link.
If you are interested in downloading the source code and compiling yourself, you should know that it is hosted on GitHub and it comes under the GPL 2.0+ and LGPL 2.1+ licenses.
As for the compilations of this environment, these are already within most Linux distributions, for example for Ubuntu (LXQt is offered by default in Lubuntu), Arch Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, Mageia, Debian, FreeBSD, ROSA and ALT Linux.
Also if you are a Debian user, you can follow the installation tutorial prepared by one of our colleagues, the link is this.