LXQt is a free, open-source, lightweight, and user-friendly desktop environment built using Qt libraries. It consists of many small individual components like a panel, session manager, hotkey daemon, and more.
It is an excellent choice if you require a low-resource, nearly fully-featured desktop environment. So, users looking for extreme performance in a desktop environment should consider LXQt.
Today, nearly seven months after the previous LXQt 1.1 release, this lightweight desktop environment has surprised its users with the release of LXQt 1.2.0. So, let’s see what’s new.
LXQt 1.2 Highlights
The file manager is one of the essential components of any working environment. In this sense, the LXQt 1.2.0 version emphasizes PCManFM, the LXQt file manager.
Dragging inside non-name columns in PCManFM’s detailed list mode makes file selection more effortless than ever, while a Wayland issue has also been resolved. In addition, also under Wayland, the position of the folder view’s drop menu has been fixed.
The search dialog elements now include the search history, and additionally, the user can change the maximum amount of history items in Preferences -> Advanced -> Search. On top of that, a new keyboard shortcut, “Ctrl+D,” has been added to PCManFM to deselect all currently selected objects.
LXQt 1.2 also includes various enhancements to the LXQt Panel. For example, Quick Launch has a context menu item for reloading desktop entries. Moreover, the issue with the position of the volume popup in the previous version under Wayland has now been fixed.
QTerminal is another essential component of the LXQt desktop environment. The important news, in this case, is that bidirectional rendering is now enabled by default. On top of that, QTermWidget can now be used as a Qt Plugin.
ScreenGrab, the application in LXQt that allows you to take screenshots, has also been improved. More precisely, while using the app with multi-screen setups, the window’s screenshot and decoration are now fixed.
LXQt 1.2.0 allows you to change the margins of the desktop workspace. This is especially useful with panels that do not reserve space but hide on overlapping windows.
We’ll close by stating that the visual glitches when smoothing scaled images have been fixed in the image viewing app LXImage. Furthermore, a new “Sorting” submenu comes in handy when viewing a folder with many images, and you need to sort them to change their viewing order quickly.
Last but not least, preliminary improvements have been made in the LXQt Session to support Wayland.
Of course, numerous other improvements and many bug fixes exist across the entire LXQt 1.2.0 Desktop Environment.
At the time of writing, LXQt 1.2.0 is only available as source code that needs to be manually compiled. In other words, no precompiled packages are available for the various Linux distros.
However, as usual, in the coming weeks, users of rolling-release distros like Arch Linux, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Void Linux, and others will be the first to get the new LXQt 1.2.0 desktop environment in the form of ready-to-install packages in their software repos.
Those interested can download the source code from the project’s GitHub page. You can find more information about the changes in LXQt 1.2.0 in the official announcement.
