After six months of development, the LXQt 1.1 user environment (Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment) was released, developed by the joint team of developers of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects. The LXQt interface continues to follow the ideas of the classic desktop organization, bringing a modern look and feel to enhance the user experience. LXQt is positioned as a lightweight, modular, fast and convenient continuation of the development of the Razor-qt and LXDE desktops, incorporating the best features of both shells. The code is hosted on GitHub and is licensed under GPL 2.0+ and LGPL 2.1+. Ready builds are expected for Ubuntu (LXQt is offered by default in Lubuntu), Arch Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, Mageia, FreeBSD, ROSA, and ALT Linux.
Features of the release:
- The file manager (PCManFM-Qt) provides a DBus interface org.freedesktop.FileManager1, which can be used in third-party applications such as Firefox and Chromium to display files in directories and perform other typical work using a standard file manager. A βRecent Filesβ section has been added to the βFileβ menu with a list of files that the user has recently worked with. An βOpen in Terminalβ element has been added to the top part of the directory context menu.
- A new component xdg-desktop-portal-lxqt is proposed with the implementation of a backend for Freedesktop portals (xdg-desktop-portal), used to organize access to resources of the user environment from isolated applications. For example, portals are used in some applications that do not use Qt, such as Firefox, to organize work with the LXQt file open dialog.
- Improved work with themes. Added a new theme and several additional desktop wallpapers. Added additional Qt palettes corresponding to LXQt dark themes to unify the appearance with the styles of Qt widgets such as Fusion (the palette can be changed through the settings "LXQt Appearance Configuration β Widget Style β Qt Palette").
- In the QTerminal terminal emulator, the functionality of bookmarks has been significantly improved and problems in the implementation of the drop-down mode for calling the terminal have been resolved. Bookmarks can be used similar to the ~/.bash_aliases file to simplify access to common commands and files that are difficult to remember. The ability to edit all bookmarks is provided.
- In the panel (LXQt Panel), when the System Tray plugin is enabled, the system tray icons are now placed inside the notification area (Status Notifier), which solved problems with showing the system tray when auto-hide of the panel is enabled. For all panel and widget settings, the Reset button works. It is possible to place several areas with notifications at once. The panel settings dialog is divided into three sections.
- Improved interface for customizing the widget to display catalog contents.
- The LXQt Power Manager now supports displaying battery percentage icons in the system tray.
- The main menu offers two new layouts of elements - Simple and Compact, which have only one nesting level. 1
- The widget for determining the color of pixels on the screen (ColorPicker) has been improved, in which the last selected colors are saved.
- A setting has been added to the session configurator (LXQt Session Settings) to set global screen scaling parameters.
- In the configurator, in the LXQt Appearance section, a separate page for setting styles for GTK is offered.
- Improved default settings. In the main menu, the search field is cleared after performing an action. The width of the buttons on the taskbar has been reduced. The default shortcuts shown on the desktop are Home, Network, Computer and Trash. The default theme has been changed to Clearlooks, and the icon 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, and unofficial free updates are generated by the KDE project). Porting to Qt 6 is not yet complete and requires stabilization of the KDE Frameworks 6 libraries. There is also no way to use the Wayland protocol, which is not officially supported, but there have been successful attempts to run LXQt components using the Mutter and XWayland composite server.
Source: opennet.ru