Developer(s) The LXQt Team Development status Active | Repository github.com/lxde/lxqt Written in C, C++ | |
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Initial release 2013; 4 years ago (2013) Stable release 0.11.1 / 2 January 2017; 2 months ago (2017-01-02) | ||
LXQt is a bundle of software packages under development, with the aim of providing a complete desktop environment. It was formed from the merger of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects.
Contents
History
Dissatisfied with GTK+ 3, Hong Jen Yee experimented with Qt in early 2013 and released the first version of a Qt-based PCManFM on 26 March 2013. He clarified, though, that this means no departure from GTK+ in LXDE, saying "The Gtk+ and Qt versions will coexist". He later ported LXDE's Xrandr front-end to Qt.
On 3 July 2013 Hong Jen Yee announced a Qt port of the full LXDE suite, and on 21 July 2013, Razor-qt and LXDE announced that they decided to merge the two projects. This merge means that the Gtk+ and the Qt versions will coexist at first but that, eventually, the GTK version will be dropped and all efforts will be focused on the Qt port. The merger of LXDE-Qt and Razor-qt was renamed LXQt, and the first release, version 0.7.0, was made available on 7 May 2014. Version 0.8.0, bringing with it full Qt 5 compatibility, was made available on 13 October 2014.
LXQt version 0.9 was released in February 2015, featuring heavy internal cleanups and refactorings. All compatibility with Qt 4 was dropped, requiring Qt 5 & KDE Frameworks 5. Qt 5.3 is now the minimum required version.
LXQt version 0.10 was released in November 2015.
LXQt version 0.11 was released on 24 September 2016. To address concerns that Qt-based apps have heavy memory usage, this release was compared against Xfce, revealing that, after a cold boot, LXQt's memory usage was of 112 Mb, just a bit less than Xfce.
Software components
LXQt consists of many modular components, some of them depending on Qt and KDE Frameworks 5.