After six months of development the release of the new version was announced of the user environment LXQt 1.1 (Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment), developed by the joint developer team of 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 that is presented, it is highlighted that the file manager PCManFM-Qt provides a DBus interface org.freedesktop.FileManager1, who can use third-party applications like 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 terminal emulator QTerminal significantly improved bookmarks functionality and solved problems in the implementation of the dropdown mode to call the terminal. Bookmarks can be used similar to the ~/.bash_aliases file to make it easy to access common commands and files that are hard to remember. Provided the ability to edit all bookmarks.
On dashboard, when the system tray plugin is enabled, systray icons are now placed inside the notification area (Status Notifier), which resolved issues with showing the system tray when the autohide panel is enabled. For all panel and widget settings, the button to reset the changes to the initial state (Reset) is provided, as well as the ability to place several areas with notifications at once. The panel settings dialog is divided into three sections.
A new component xdg-desktop-portal-lxqt with the implementation of a backend for Freedesktop portals (xdg-desktop-portal), which is used to organize access to resources in the user's environment from isolated applications. For example, portals are used in some non-Qt applications, such as Firefox, to manage the LXQt file open dialog.
The improved work with the themes is also highlighted, since added a new theme and some additional wallpapers, plus added additional Qt palettes to match LXQt dark themes to unify the look and feel with Qt widget styles like Fusion (palette can be changed via “LXQt Appearance Settings → Widget Style → Qt Palette” ).
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- 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.
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.