Few days ago, The team behind LXQt announced the release of “LXQt 2.1.0”, which arrives after six months of development and which presents advances in the migration of the environment towards the use of Wayland, improvements in the components and, above all, the correction of errors.
For those who do not know about LXQt 2.1, you should know that this isIt is a lightweight, modular and modern desk, Combining the best of LXDE and Razor-qt, following a classic organization but with improvements aimed at efficiency and ease of use, LXQt is a standout choice for those looking for an agile and customizable desktop.
Main new features of LXQt 2.1.0
The new version of LXQt 2.1.0 presents various improvements implemented in the adoptionProtocol wayland, with the inclusion of a dedicated component, lxqt-wayland-session, which allows LXQt to run in combination with several compatible composite managers. Supported managers include LabWC, Wayfire, kwin_wayland, Sway, Hyprland, River and Niri and an option has been added to the session settings to select the preferred composite manager.
For now, Wayland is still an experimental option, with default support for X11-based sessions, as for Wayland-based sessions the experience varies depending on the selected composite manager. For example, the composite manager Labwc stands out for offering the greatest stability during use, making it the most reliable choice.
On the other hand, kwin_wayland is positioned as the most complete alternative In terms of functionality, provided the necessary additional packages are installed of the KDE ecosystem. The latter is also the only manager that currently allows access to features such as virtual desktop management and advanced power management options, such as turning off the monitor.
As for the visual options, You can enjoy desktop images by using compound administrators such as kwin_wayland, Wayfire or Hyprland. For handling lock screens in Wayland sessions, LXQt provides support for composite servers such as waylock, swaylock, hyprlock and kwin_wayland itself, which includes a native implementation enabled via the "loginctl lock-session" command.
In addition to this, LXQt 2.1.0 includes several improvements to the PCManFM-Qt file manager, as support for Wayland-based sessions has been integrated, and it is now possible to configure independent multi-screen desktops and Translucency support has been added. Additionally, users can manually enter file paths in the selection dialog and disable thumbnail generation on external file systems from the configuration options.
The LXQt has also received improvements, as the new “Fancy Menu” allows filtering apps by their executable name, while the custom command widget now supports horizontal scrolling.
LXQt 2.1.0 also introduces the support for reversing the order of the items on the tray, and the volume control plugin has optimized its operation with the ALSA sound system. In Wayland environments, the taskbar is now functional, thanks to the implementation of two backends: one designed for kwin_wayland and another compatible with wlroots-based admins. It is worth noting that the virtual desktop switcher is currently only available with kwin_wayland.
In the session settings, Experimental sections have been introduced that allow selecting a composite server and a lockscreen for Wayland, functionality that depends on the installation of the lxqt-wayland-session package and the availability of compatible composite servers on the system.
In the Settings Center, integration with Wayland has been strengthened and visual options such as adjusting the size of icons in the toolbar and customizing the colors of information tools have been added.
Finally, the terminal emulator QTerminal has expanded its support for Wayland and an issue related to configuration changes affecting other instances of the application has also been fixed, improving the user experience in Wayland environments.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
Download and get LXQt 2.1.0
For those interested in trying out LXQt 2.1.0, you should know that this new version is now available Available on official channels of the main distributions, in addition to the fact that it is also source code available for compilation.