After six months of development, the release of the new version of the LXQt user environment 1.1 (Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment) was announced , developed by the joint team of developers from the LXDE and Razor-qt projects.
The LXQt interface continues to follow the classic desktop organization with a modern look and feel that enhances the user experience. LXQt is positioned as a lightweight, modular, fast and convenient continuation of the Razor-qt and LXDE desktop development, incorporating the best features of both.
Main new features of LXQt 1.1
In this new version, it is highlighted that the PCManFM-Qt file manager provides a DBus org.freedesktop.FileManager1 interface , which can be used by third-party applications such as Firefox and Chromium to display files in directories and perform other common tasks using the native file manager.
“Recent Files” section has been added to the “File” menu with a list of files the user has recently worked with. Added “Open in Terminal” item to the top of the directory context menu.
The QTerminal terminal emulator significantly improved bookmark functionality and resolved issues with the dropdown mode implementation for launching the terminal. Bookmarks can be used similarly to the ~/.bash_aliases file to easily access common commands and files that are difficult to remember. It also provided the ability to edit all bookmarks.
In the panel, when the system tray plugin is enabled, the system tray icons are now placed within the notification area (Status Notifier), resolving issues with the system tray displaying when the auto-hide panel is enabled. For all panel and widget settings, a button is provided to reset changes to the initial state (Reset), and the ability to place multiple notification areas simultaneously is also available. The panel settings dialog is divided into three sections.
A new component, xdg-desktop-portal-lxqt, is proposed with the implementation of a backend for Freedesktop portals (xdg-desktop-portal), which is used to organize access to user environment resources from isolated applications . For example, portals are used in some non-Qt applications, such as Firefox, to manage the LXQt file opening dialog.
Also noteworthy is the improved work with themes, as a new theme and some additional desktop backgrounds have been added, in addition to the addition of extra Qt palettes to match LXQt's dark themes to unify the appearance with Qt widget styles such as Fusion (the palette can be changed via "LXQt Appearance Settings → Widget Style → Qt Palette").
Other notable changes in this new version include:
- Improved interface to configure the widget to display directory content.
- The power management manager (LXQt Power Manager) supports displaying icons with the battery charge percentage in the system tray.
- The main menu offers two new item layouts: Simple and Compact, which have only one level of nesting.
- The widget for determining the color of screen pixels (ColorPicker), in which the last selected colors are saved, has been improved.
- Added a setting to the session configurator (LXQt Session Settings) to set global screen scaling options.
- In the configurator, in the LXQt Appearance section, there is a separate page for configuring styles for GTK.
- Improved default settings. In the main menu, it is enabled to clear the search field after performing an action.
- The width of the buttons on the taskbar has been reduced.
- The default desktop shortcuts are Start, Network, Computer, and Trash.
- The default theme was changed to Clearlooks and the icon was set to Breeze.
Currently, the Qt 5.15 branch is required to work (official updates for this branch are released only under a commercial license, while unofficial free updates are generated by the KDE project).
The migration to Qt 6 is not yet complete and requires stabilization of the KDE Frameworks 6 libraries. Also, there is no way to use the Wayland protocol, which is not officially supported, but there are successful attempts to run LXQt components using Mutter and XWayland Composite Server.
For more details about the release of this new version, you can consult the following link.
If you are interested in downloading the source code and compiling it yourself, you should know that it is hosted on GitHub and comes under the GPL 2.0+ and LGPL 2.1+ licenses.