After 6 months of development, the release of LXQt 2.3.0 (Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment) is presented, continuing the development of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects. The LXQt interface follows the ideas of classical desktop organization but brings modern design and techniques that enhance usability. LXQt is positioned as a lightweight, modular, fast, and user-friendly environment that combines the best features of LXDE and Razor-qt. The code is hosted on GitHub and is available under the GPL 2.0+ and LGPL 2.1+ licenses. Pre-built versions are expected for Ubuntu (LXQt is offered by default in Lubuntu), Arch Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, Mageia, FreeBSD, ROSA, and ALT Linux.
In the new version:
- Improved support for the Wayland protocol. The lxqt-wayland-session component, which allows running LXQt in conjunction with various Wayland compositors (LabWC, WayFire, kwin_wayland, Sway, Hyprland, River, and Niri), has added a handler lxqt-qdbus that provides a universal wrapper over various qdbus commands, independent of the compositor. Automatically launched applications are now correctly categorized. The global scaling level can now only be set for X11, while in Wayland, to change the scaling level, one should use the capabilities of compositors or external utilities such as kanshi.
- In Wayland-based environments, the interface for switching between virtual desktops has been implemented in the panel when using compositors servers, supporting the ext-workspaces-v1 protocol, such as Labwc and Niri.
- A new IPC-based backend has been added to the panel for operation over the Wayfire compositor (in terms of the number of supported panel operations, Wayfire now only lags behind KWin-Wayland).
- In the panel plugin ‘Custom Command’, there is now support for structured output working with Wayland and X11 and the ability to refresh the content while continuing the output from the running command.
- In the panel, the ability to activate the ‘Show Desktop’ plugin through drag & drop operations has been implemented. In the brightness controller plugin, the ability to change brightness using the mouse wheel has been added. In the Fancy Menu and Main Menu, support for sorting items considering locale has been provided.
- In the ScreenGrab utility for taking screenshots, the ability to operate in Wayland environments with compositors has been added. servers, supporting the protocol "wlr_screencopy." Improvements have been made to the color highlighting of the selected area in X11-based environments.
- In the PCManFM-Qt file manager, a "Safely Remove" option has been added to the context menu of the sidebar for the safe ejection of drives. An option to disable pop-up hints for files on the desktop has been added to the settings.
- The QTerminal terminal emulator and the QTermWidget now support Emoji flags. An item has been added to the context menu for toggling bookmarks.
- The power management manager has added an option to turn off the monitor in Wayland-based environments (supports composite managers KWin, niri, and Hyprland).
- The LXQt Archiver program has added support for the LZ4 compression algorithm.
- A new wiki site for the project has been launched with an improved search system (content from old wiki pages has been preserved).
Source: opennet.ru
