I notice this forum is a bit empty, so I decided to talk about my experiences with LXQt. I wanted to know why people hated on it and preferred LXDE after the decision made by the Lubuntu devs.
I installed EndeavourOS with this D.E. and chose GRUB instead of the other bootloader option. It took a fairly long time to work but itās because my computer and Internet connection are slow. I didnāt install anything else from the list in Calamares such as base system, D.E. stuff because it didnāt have options for āreal appsā.
Commend the devs of this D.E. for having a complete set of touchpad options, to disable tap-to-click and scrolling which were very annoying on my laptop. I donāt mind plugging in a wireless mouse but I have like no space. This is for a budget laptop that has no numeric keypad.
Not very high on the file manager. However there is sign of improvement over the outdated PCManFM on Knoppix. Sometimes it does like Thunar putting a horizontal scrollbar, robbing one filename entry in full list mode. As a result, hide the status bar which doesnāt give useful information. For the full list mode only, the file manager has an option: āDisable smooth scrolling in list and compact modesā. This is very much appreciated, and all other D.E.'s should have this option. With no ability to disable smooth scroll Mousepad and Thunar steadily drive me crazy on XFCE.
One good thing OpenBox has is the easy ability to change the window appearance and fonts. (LOL although this could be unbearably slow on NomadBSD.) A palette could be chosen which makes some icons difficult to see, then the user has to choose a different tab of the same dialog to do something about it. I just donāt like this W.M. by itself then, kept having comfort issues on Bunsen Labs Beryllium which forced me to back it up perhaps to forget about it. Yeah itās unfair.
I like the ability to make the program window nearly as large as the screen but Iām grasping so it acts like KDE, having an option āwindows can coverā the panel while the panel remains on the screen. Otherwise itās another thing other D.E. should take notice of. Some of the screensaver tricks are kewl! But Iām forced to shut down that daemon totally because in my usage itās possible for me to āidleā at my computer for 15 to 30 minutes or maybe longer, and instead of setting it to an hour might as well shut off.
Then I installed GIMP and Wine. The former wanted at least 500MB installed LOL. Running āwinecfgā didnāt give me the dialog, soon after it asked to install Wine-Mono it timed out on āwineserverā saying it couldnāt find ākernel32.dllā but kept going. But everything seems to be OK.
i use my self slock as screenlocker, i removed xscreensaver and add in lxqt.conf lock command for it
i wanted to use kwin, but kwin does hate azerty keyboards , u can use kscreenlocker also as screenlocker when u use kwinā¦
As april it comes, lxqt is gona move up to qt6 , pcmanfm-qt and lximage-qt has there version bumps already.
with lxqt you or not to bonded at a WM with some hack you can make sway work to but mostly all wayland wmās has a deeper hack then working with i3wm or somethingā¦
xfwm4 could probably doable tooā¦
i am pretty used to lxqt but is currently my preference
Iām glad to see Lxqt get some love. I really like this minimal desktop. To me, itās like having the best of Plasma without all the extras that I do not want and never use. Lxqt does everything I need it to and stays out of the way. It doesnāt try to be everything including the kitchen sink with lots of extra color schemes for the kitchen sink thrown in just for kicks. Cosmetically, itās a little rough around the edges but thatās hardly a deal breaker and Iād rather have Lxqt like this than all the extra bells and whistles. I look forward to seeing Lxqt evolve and I wish more people would give it a chance.
I also like the teamā¦ stefonarch as example is a bit like joe kamprad of endeavouros ā¦ just like a hack playing doing things research testing and helping a lot people on git and telegram and matrix. While developers more ik background to the gitā¦for upcomming april update i am curius lol
Glad to see LXQt getting some love and attention. Iām very biased towards Qt based environments and applications, but I love LXQt. I use Plasma on my laptop and LXQt on an older HP Pavilion 300-020. LXQt can be themed really nicely, itās performant, and runs wonderful on older hardware.
Lxqt+kwin with bismuth was a pheonomenally fun setup. I just could never firgure out how to mess with the shortcut settings for bismuth. Otherwise, I quite enjoyed it. Itās definitely under rated.
Wait, but Qt v6 would happen soon? So LXQt would be affected by it sooner than KDE? Would it have an effect on performance? I hope not. Iām about to update my āflagshipā installation which has the latter, to the ālast LTSā. I donāt know, I should get the right to block it, while updating Linux, Wine, EOS apps etc.
The port to Qt6 has been in progress since Feb 2022. There will most likely be no noticable change once the full swap to Qt6 is done. The latest 1.2 release is still based on Qt5.15.
I didnāt want to create a new thread with the same topic, so I thought I would use this one even though the last reply is 25 days old.
Yesterday I reinstalled my laptop using āpureā Arch Linux with LXQt. I first wanted to use EndeavourOS, but the online installer just freezes (issue of weak hardware I think) and I didnāt want to install Xfce just to replace it with LXQt.
I never had such a lightweight system. When there is no application running I use up as little as 300MB of memory according to neofetch and htop. Thatās less than what I was using with EndeavourOS on i3wm! Also the disk usage is really minimal, which is nice as I just have a 32GB eMMC.
I really like the qterminal. Especially itās ability to divide the terminal window horizontally and vertically is amazing.
PCManFM-qt seems like a perfectly fine file explorer to me and I like the connman system tray even better than the one from network manager. Itās like a one-stop-shop for all kinds of connectivity (ethernet, wi-fi, bluetooth, vpn).
Now the con: It took me forever to customize the ālook and feelā of the desktop. Some of the theme settings are really easy done from the on-board settings or kvantum (I would recommend to install the kvantum manager), but I was also editing a lot of config files, e.g. for adding menu entries in the application menu I created .desktop files in /usr/share/applications. There are probably GUI tools for such things as well but I didnāt want to bloat my install.
Now that I am done with the configuration it appears to be like the best DE I ever used. Itās super fast, very resource saving and good looking.
This is the same for any DE, although the recommended path is local $XDG_DATA_HOME/applications.
I canāt think of a reason to add menu entries, for existing applications, so you probably want something not existing? Then a custom .desktop file is the only way to do it.
Unless you mean something elseā¦
Exactly, there is one shell-script I want to be able to run from the app menu and the other thing is a proprietary scanner software.
Besides that I could think of other use as well. For example if someone wants to start his update in a terminal by clicking on a menu entry, that would also be doable if you create a custom .desktop. I guess it depends on the preferences of people.
But the whisker menu of Xfce e.g. is customizable by alacarte very easy in a GUI. I think Plasma might even have some onboard GUI for that.
In general I think the more common DEs have a couple more comfortable options for customization, at least I donāt remember spending so much time on it for Xfce or Plasma. But maybe it was already preconfigured
And anyways the advantages of LXQt are making up for the time I spent. And you just have to configure it once.
Edit: In general the lack of more bloating settings and GUIs is one of the biggest advantages after all as it keeps the DE lightweight.
Themes were always a minor pain point for me with LXQt. The other issue I had is no ādefaultā automatic tiling or fractional scaling. Iām running my EOS LXQt on a 27" 4k monitor, and tiling is extremely useful. I swapped in Kwin as the WM with Bismuth and itās almost perfect. Resource usage is a bit higher and it adds some bloat, but still extremely performant. Iām a Plasma stan, but I think I prefer my LXQt install to my Plasma install overall.
The applications/utilities that xfce (alacarte) and KDE use, are available also in any DE (if you install them).
I donāt know any DE that has a native/embedded menu editor.
Plasma also has one built in KDE menu editor. At least they have a handbook on their homepage and I think I also might have used it.
But anyways. I didnāt want to criticise LXQt for not having it. I just wanted to give an example. And yes, I for sure could have installed a GUI for that purpose that works under LXQt.
Lxqt is basicle just a desktop environment without an wmā¦most wmās is doable also some wayland wmās but running xwayland for now with wayfire hyperland there is another workaroundā¦ almost frankenstein lolā¦ i find it pretty simple and to setup what you want you dont need openbox you can use xfwm4 or kwin if you like thatā¦
There is a wingmenu but is stil bit wipā¦cause of licende lxqt didnt addedā¦ but end april wil see lxqt qt6 curius lol
LOL Discourse bugging me again to pick a solution for this topic. So I have done that, so this is not another topic that is āendlessā. Thank you to everybody who replied in this topic.
I wound up installing Mousepad and Thunar. There is no perfect file manager for me, but PCManFM absolutely forced my hand. It kept selecting ānoā and I kept tripping on it when I wanted to permanently delete a file. I canāt do anything about the list mode, the columns resizing how they want to and never how I set it once. No file manager, it seems, wants to submit like that.
In fact, the external disk I first installed to was a bit damaged, slow access from it and thatās why I reinstalled somewhere else, but kept the user configuration around and just copied it over to the new install in one pass.
One thing I do like about OpenBox is the āthemingā, the ones they got are good enough for me.
TL;DR The environment is OK but has a few things that still annoy me.
