The lightweight LXQt desktop environment is now available in version 1.3.0. The project maintainers primarily corrected errors and improved the file manager.
Most of the changes concern the PCManFM-Qt file manager and its LibFM-Qt library. Among other things, the soft scrolling used by default can now be switched off in all displays. Previously, this was only possible for the list and compact views. If you create a new file, PCManFM-Qt now suggests the general file name “New file” and no longer “New text file”. This change was primarily necessary with regard to the Glib library used in many Linux systems, which no longer automatically regards empty files as text files from version 2.75.1.
LXQt: Trembling desktop elements
Other innovations relate to handling the desktop: If you intervene in its configuration, the elements on the desktop “tremble” again after the changes have been applied. Furthermore, LXQt 1.3.0 sets a title for the desktop, as the developers write in the release announcement. The LXQt developers are thus accommodating some Wayland compositors who manipulate the display of the window using predefined rules. The new title allows the compositors to specifically influence the desktop view.
worked so far lxqt-sudo as a graphical frontend for sudo and su. In LXQt 1.3.0, the tool can also use the program doas catch up, which is mainly used with OpenBSD. Further work went into the translations and the session manager. The latter now recognizes the window manager and the system tray better. In the terminal, the developers mainly hunted down bugs. In QTerminal, the color change between light and dark color scheme works again without errors, while the context menu appears in the correct place under Wayland.
QT6 in sight
In the background, the LXQt developers have already started the migration to Qt 6. Although work on this is quite advanced, the KDE Framework 6 used by LXQt is not yet available in a stable version. LXQt 1.3.0 is therefore still based on Qt 5.15 and thus the last version from the 5 series with Long Term Support.
For example, the recently released Fedora 38 is also available with the LXQt desktop environment. However, it is still LXQt 1.2. LXQt 1.3.0 can already be tried out in Arch Linux, for example, but other distributions should also soon offer an update to the new version.
(dmk)
