Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, LXQt (LXDE-Qt) is a lightweight desktop environment, unifying both LXDE and Razor-Qt. It uses PCManFM-Qt, a version of PCManFM, re-written in Qt, as the default file manager and Openbox as window manager and has support for Wayland, a new display server developed by Red Hat.
For now, LXQt is used by default on Siduction, but it can be installed on Arch Linux, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mageia and Manjaro.
The latest version available is LXQt 0.8 which has been released yesterday, being entirely developed in Qt 5.3, but also compatible with Qt4.
Among others, it got a new component called lxqt-admin, which brings a new set of basic admin tools, a new theme called Plasma Next, based on the KDE Plasma 5 theme, a new theme called Dark Alpha, improved support for multiple displays, support for setting a default UI font, improved compatibility with systemd and logind, support for drag and drop on the desktop and a lot of bug-fixes.
For a full list of changes and new features, see the changelog.
The LXDE developers have also posted an article giving RAM consumption numbers of XFCE, LXDE and LXQt, all this systems running on a virtual Debian Testing system with 512 MB of RAM and a single core processor:
- XFCE: 89 MB (with default configuration of Debian. This value will increase after xfce is ported to gtk+ 3)
- LXDE (gtk+ 2 version): 78 MB (add 20 MB to openbox)
- LXQt: 95 MB (add 37 MB to openbox, still has some room for optimization)
In this article I will show you how to install LXQt 0.8 on Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17 Qiana, Pinguy OS 14.04, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya, Deepin 2014, Peppermint Five, LXLE 14.04, Linux Lite 2.0 and other Ubuntu derivative systems.
To install and test LXQt 0.8 on your Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr and derivative systems, all you have to do is add the needed ppas to your system, upgrade the package and install the lxqt-metapackage, lxqt-panel and openbox packages. Like this:
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubuntu-dev/lubuntu-daily
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install lxqt-metapackage lxqt-session lxsession
Optional, to remove LXQt 0.8, do:
$ sudo apt-get remove lxqt-metapackage lxqt-session lxsession
$ sudo apt-get autoremove