Release Announcements

0.9 Release Announcement

We are proud to announce the release 0.9.0 of LXQt, the Lightweight Qt desktop environment

This release drops all compatibility with Qt 4. It also features heavy internal cleanups and refactorings. Qt 5.3 is now the minimum required version.

LXQt 0.9 also brings in our first KDE Frameworks dependencies. KWindowSystem is a true-and-tested library for handling window events. It replaces our custom XFitMan library and will greatly help in becoming fully compatible with Wayland. KGuiAddons also replaces a hard dependency on Xlib in lxqt-panel. A huge thanks to the KDE team for making Frameworks available for projects like ours :-)

Theme changes:

New theme: "Frost". A cold, dark theme courtesy of Inti Alonso. Screenshots available on lxqt.org!
A-Mego, Flat and Green have been deleted as they were low quality or too similar to other themes.
The old Dark theme has been merged with the Flat Dark theme from LXQt 0.8.

Please note that theme re-configuration will be needed if you are using one of the old themes.

Component changes:

The functionality of the old lxqt-power has been restored into an "lxqt-leave" component. It is now part of lxqt-session.
Panel background is now configurable
The main menu plugin can now be navigated using the keyboard
The Clock plugin has been merged into the World Clock plugin. It has received several changes and no longer requires ICU. Reconfiguring the clock may be required upon upgrading depending on your settings.
The power management component now supports displaying multiple batteries

Other changes:

KWindowSystem replaces XfitMan in lxqt-panel, lxqt-runner, lxqt-session, lxqt-notificationd and lxqt-session.
KGuiAddons replaces a hard dependency on Xlib in lxqt-panel
A copy of xdg-utils is no longer bundled with LXQt. The minimum xdg-utils version required is 2012-03-02.

It should be noted that Qt 5.4 has several regressions from 5.3 which impact LXQt to some extent. While most have been worked around, drag & drop issues with PCManFM have not. Thankfully, that issue is fixed in the upcoming Qt 5.4.1 release. See the following pages for more details:

Downloads are available on downloads.lxqt.org. Please note that the location has changed since 0.8 and the old download location is no longer available.

http://downloads.lxqt.org/lxqt/

Issues? Suggestions? Wild new ideas? Everything happens on our Github issue tracker:

https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues

Want to contribute? We are always looking for new developers, now more than ever. Take a look at our new beginner's guide on contributing code and join us!

https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/wiki/Contributing-code

Thank you for flying LXQt.

The LXDE team

0.8 Release Announcement

We are proud to announce the long-awaited release of LXQt 0.8.0.

This release brings full Qt5 compatibility to LXQt. Qt4 support is still available, although it will be dropped entirely next release.

In the five months since the release of LXQt 0.7.0, we have seen a surge of interest and several new developers have joined us. Collaboration with other desktop environments has been very promising and we are very excited to be able to pick up new KDE Frameworks libraries to replace custom, duplicated and often sub-par functionality.

The release highlights are available below. For a list of full changes in each component, please see our commit history on http://git.lxde.org/

Full Qt 5 support. Run cmake with -DUSE_QT5 to enable it.
New component: lxqt-admin. This brings an optional set of basic admin tools such as configuration for date & time as well as users and groups.
New theme: Plasma Next. Based on KDE Plasma Next theme.
New theme: Dark Alpha, by Inti Alonso.
Much improved support for multiple displays.
Support for RGBA transparency if compositing is available.
lxqt-config-randr has been removed. It has been replaced by lxqt-config-monitor.
pcmanfm-qt: Support single-click to activate items
pcmanfm-qt: Support drag & drop on the desktop
pcmanfm-qt: Implement integration with the ark archive manager
pcmanfm-qt: Improve readability in icon view
lxqt-panel: Support reordering of taskbar buttons
lxqt-panel: Support "urgency" hint
lxqt-panel: Add support for OSS in volume control, if available
lxqt-powermanagement: Improved compatibility with systemd/logind
Integrate with compton if available (disabled by default)
Add support for setting a default UI font
Lots of performances improvements.
Lots and lots of bugfixes.