Some people don't like it, but it's an inevitable future. Wayland is already present in desktops like GNOME or Plasma, but for others, like Cinnamon or Budgie, it will take a little longer to arrive. There are graphical environments that enjoy a certain popularity due to their lightness, although they are a little behind in terms of some functions, and today the launch has been announced and availability of a LXQt 2.1.0 Among its new features we find an experimental Wayland session.
LXQt Wayland Session is a new component that allows you to choose a Wayland session from the LXQt Session settings. It supports Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River, and Niri, and adds “LXQt (Wayland)” as an option when logging in. The project advises to also choose a Wayland composer from the dropdown menu for the best possible experience. Screen locking is provided by waylock, swaylock o hyprlock, while Kwin has its own blocking tool. With all this, although experimental, Wayland support would be complete.
For those who prefer to stay in X.Org, the LXQt Project ensures that X11 will be supported indefinitely, which I don't think means forever, but it is still supported and they have no plans to remove it at the moment.
Other new features in LXQt 2.1.0
- En LibFM-Qt/PCManFM-Qt has fixed bugs, independent multi-screen desktops are supported under Wayland, the desktop supports translucency under Wayland (for using external wallpaper applications), relative paths are allowed for custom folder icons, paths can now be entered into the name input of the LXQt file dialog, and thumbnails can now be disabled on remote filesystems.
- Now LXQt taskbar Panel works on Wayland. Also, the desktop switcher works under
kwin_wayland, two Wayland back-ends are added: oneparakwin_wayland , the other for composers compatible withwlroots(but not necessarily based on it). The appropriate backend is automatically enabled for the Wayland session chosen in the new LXQt Session Configuration section. Additionally, Fancy Menu filtering works with exec name, horizontal wheel scrolling works with custom command, an option to reverse the order of tray items is added, closing the menu with the "Meta" shortcut in the Main Menu and Fancy Menu is fixed, and Alsa-related issues in the volume plugin are fixed. - configuration center: The application is made compatible with Wayland in several ways. In addition to several fixes, such as more informative tooltips being displayed in the Settings Center or tooltip colors being added to the LXQt Appearance Settings, a checkbox to use the palette provided by the LXQt theme, and an option to change the size of toolbar icons.
- QTerminal: Fixed an issue where changing settings while running other instances of QTerminal could cause conflicts, added a tooltip for the Wayland dropdown shortcut, and added more user-friendly text for split menu items, among other fixes.
Wayland, Wayland, Wayland
As you can read in the list of new features above, LXQt 2.1.0 has put its focus on Wayland. It is the graphical server of the future that will improve in areas such as security and performance, or so the theory goes. At first it will only be available as an experiment, but in the future it should arrive in the form of a stable version and be the default graphics protocol used.
Interested users can download the LXQt 2.1.0 tarball from your GitHub page, something not recommended in most scenarios. In the next few weeks it will be added to the official repositories of some distributions with a Rolling Release development model, such as Arch Linux, while it will reach others in the next few months. This version has arrived six months after the earlier version, whose most notable new feature was the jump to Qt 6.6.