LXQt’s Desktop Component Is Now 100% Ready for Wayland

Full Wayland will be one of the highlights of the upcoming LXQt 2.0 desktop environment series, due in April 2024.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
LXQt's Desktop Wayland

The LXQt Project announced today in a post on X that LXQt’s desktop component (PCManFM-Qt) is now 100 percent ready for Wayland.

A few weeks ago, the LXQt devs published some details about the development state of the next major release, LXQt 2.0, stating that while many LXQt apps and components are already working perfectly on Wayland they plan to add some missing pieces to make the lightweight desktop environment 100% Wayland-ready.

Well, thanks to the developers of layer-shell-qt, a component designed for apps to be able to easily use clients based on the wlr-layer-shell protocol, LXQt’s file and desktop icon manager PCManFM-Qt received support for the Wayland display protocol, according to this pull request.

“Previously, workarounds provided by some Wayland compositors (like LabWC) were needed for having a usable desktop under Wayland,” said Tsu Jan, a LXQt developer. “Now that layer-shell-qt6 has come to Arch, I’ve prepared a patch that makes PCManFM-Qt’s desktop completely ready for Wayland.”

Full Wayland support will be one of the highlights of the LXQt 2.0 desktop environment, which is expected to see the light of day next month. However, the devs still need to iron out some issues to achieve full Wayland support for LXQt. The progress can be observed here.

Another major change in LXQt 2.0 will be the port to the latest Qt 6 open-source application framework, providing users with a more modern UI/UX, as well as a performance boost compared to the current Qt 5-based releases. LXQt 2.0 will also drop Qt 5 support completely.

We expect to see the LXQt 2.0 desktop environment by default in the upcoming Lubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) operating system, due in late April 2024, but you should also be able to install it on various rolling-release distros like Arch Linux or openSUSE Tumbleweed.

Lubuntu 24.04 LTS will also feature an optional Wayland session.

Image credits: LXQt Project

Update: I’ve updated the article to reflect the fact that LXQt’s file and desktop icon manager PCManFM-Qt received support for Wayland and that the LXQt desktop environment is not yet 100% Wayland-ready. The LXQt devs apologized on X for the misunderstanding.

Last updated 2 months ago

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