The development team behind the lightweight LXQt desktop environment has provided some details on the development state of the next major release, LXQt 2.0.
The biggest change in LXQt 2.0 will be the port to the latest Qt 6 open-source application framework to provide users with more modern UI/UX and also bring them a performance boost compared to the current Qt 5-based releases. With this change, LXQt will completely drop Qt 5 support.
Most of the default apps and core components have already been ported to Qt 6, including the session, notifications, power management, appearance, input, monitor, file associations, and locale settings, Qps, QTerminal, Screengrab, runner, LXQt Admin, LXQt sudo, as well as LXQt OpenSSH Askpass.
The rest of the components, such as the panel, desktop, PCmanFM-Qt file manager, LXimage-Qt image viewer, PolicyKit, PavuControl, and global shortcuts will all be ported to Qt 6 until April, when the LXQt devs plan to launch the final release of LXQt 2.0, though no date was set yet.
Another interesting change in the upcoming LXQt 2.0 release will be a new default applications menu, called “Fancy Menu”, which will finally be on par with the default applications menus of most desktop environments, featuring an All Applications section, a Favorites section, and an improved search function.
On top of that, LXQt 2.0 promises improved support for the Wayland display protocol. Many LXQt apps and components are already working perfectly on Wayland, but with the upcoming release, the devs plan to add some missing pieces that should make LXQt run better on Wayland.
“A missing piece is the release of layer-shell-qt 6.0 as the actual version can’t be used except to some extent in the notification daemon, the second most missing piece is a taskmanager-plugin in the panel for Wayland,” said the devs in the blog post. “Some steps are on the way in this direction, but “long is the way to Wayland” so patience is needed here and help is always welcome naturally.”
One thing that will not change with Wayland is LXQt’s philosophy of being modular in the sense that it will work with all wlroots-based Wayland compositors. For now, the devs are focusing their work around Labwc, a Wayland window-stacking compositor inspired by Openbox.
Last updated 3 hours ago