LXQt 0.17 is released. The lightweight desktop environment brings its latest version LXQt 0.17 with moderate improvements across modules and their components. This is what’s new.
LXQt is a Qt-based, super lightweight Linux desktop used by many for a faster desktop experience in low-end hardware. LXQt is offered by mainstream Linux distributions as an optional desktop choice. For example, Lubuntu, Fedora Linux LXQt edition, Manjaro, Void Linux, and others.
Often LXQt has been seen as the fastest desktop today, beating Xfce, KDE Plasma in terms of performance, responsiveness, and storage footprint.
This release comes within a couple of months of the prior LXQt 0.16 release which brought a huge list of changes. That said, let’s quickly take a look at what’s new.
LXQt 0.17 – New Features
Although the feature list is very moderate this time, here’s a summary of the important ones.
- LXQt terminates all child processes on exiting the session. This allows non-LXQt apps to save their last settings at the session end and also prevents rare exit crashes in some of them.
- The default file manager PCManFM-Qt 0.17 brings a handful of improvements. The file manager now shows the creation time in the details view.
- An item is added to Tools menus to activate Admin mode provided by GVFS — for transferring files beyond user permissions but without a root instance.
- You can create launchers/shortcuts directly from the file manager’s Tools menu.
- Many improvements are seen when opening files of various types, blurred thumbnail problem in PCManFM-Qt.
- LXQt Power Manager has separate idle watchers for AC and battery and also an option to disable them when the active window is fullscreen.
- LXQt Panel has an option for behaving like a dock, i.e., auto-hiding only on overlapping a window.
- LXImage Qt – the image viewer made the option to autofit the images while browsing.
- Thumbnail options are added to the Preferences dialog in the LXImage Qt.
- Archive tool LXQt Archiver can remember the window settings, made the horizontal scrolling possible in the side pane. It also enabled to open of the .iso disk images.
And many bug fixes also landed in this release. Check out for more details in the changelog.
Download and Install LXQt 0.17
LXQt 0.17 is available for Arch Linux and other rolling releases already (as testing). So. if you are running the LXQt 0.16 desktop, a simple upgrade would bring the latest version.
If you want to install LXQt 0.17 in Arch Linux as a fresh system, follow this guide.
Lubuntu 21.04 and Fedora 34 will not feature LXQt 0.17 due to schedule conflicts. Hence you get the LXQt 0.17 in those distributions later this year.
Closing Notes
The updates are very moderate this time. You should remember that the LXQt team has very few contributors compared to KDE Plasma, GNOME, or Xfce. It probably doesn’t attract developers anymore due to its “classic” nature. However, periodical and little improvements over time go a long way. And the desktop itself is solid with few bugs and it works. And there is no point changing something stable and well built in the software world.
