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The LXQt 2.0 desktop environment has been released today as a major milestone bringing Qt 6 support and advancing support for the Wayland display protocol to more components.
The big highlight of this release is that LXQt 2.0 is fully ported to the latest Qt 6 application framework to provide users with a more modern UI. However, this doesn’t mean Qt 5-based apps aren’t supported. Distros can ship LXQt 2.0 with Qt5 styling and Qt5 file dialog by renaming some packages to be installed in parallel with their Qt 6 versions.
This release also introduces a new default application menu for the LXQt Panel, which you can see in the featured screenshot above. The new applications menu is called “Fancy Menu” and features “Favorites” and “All Applications” categories, as well as an improved search functionality.
LXQt 2.0 also adds Wayland support to more components, such as PCManFM-Qt file manager’s desktop module, LXQt Runner, and LXQt desktop notifications. LXQt Panel also features Wayland support for positioning the panel by using the “layer shell protocol.”
Wayland compositors that support the “layer shell protocol” include LabWC, Wayfire, kwin_wayland, Hyprland, Sway, as well as others, and the LXQt devs said that PCManFM-Qt can now give users a real desktop with Wayland compositors that implement the “layer shell protocol”, like those based on wlroots or KDE Plasma‘s KWin.
The LXQt development is confident that the next major release, LXQt 2.1, will be fully Wayland compatible. The components that need to be ported to Wayland include ScreenGrab, LXQt Global Shortcuts, LXQt Panel’s task-bar and keyboard indicator, some input settings, and settings of monitor, power button, and screen locker.
Unfortunately, the QTerminal terminal emulator app is the only app that wasn’t ported to Qt 6 as part of the LXQt 2.0 release and will be released at a later time. Until then, LXQt 2.0 will ship with the Qt 5-based QTerminal 1.4.0 version.
For more details, check out the release notes on the release announcement page on the official website. LXQt 2.0 will soon be available in the stable software repositories of popular rolling-release distributions like Arch Linux or openSUSE Tumbleweed, but you should be able to install it shortly on other distros as well.
Image credits: LXQt Project
Last updated 2 weeks ago
