LXQt is a

free and open source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

lightweight

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphica ...

. It was formed from the merger of the

LXDE LXDE (abbreviation for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment with comparatively low resource requirements. This makes it especially suitable for use on older or resource-constrained personal computers such as netb ...

and

Razor-qt Razor-qt is a discontinued free and open-source desktop environment. It was intended as a lightweight desktop environment based upon the Qt application framework, and was "tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive inte ...

projects. Like its

GTK GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and propriet ...

predecessor LXDE, LXQt does not ship or develop its own

window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction ...

, instead LXQt lets the user decide which (supported) window manager they want to use.

Linux distributions A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

commonly default LXQt to Openbox or xfwm4 or

kwin KWin is a window manager for the X Window System and a Wayland compositor. It is released as a part of KDE Plasma 5, for which it is the default window manager. KWin can also be used on its own or with other desktop environments. KWin can be c ...

History

Dissatisfied with

maintainer Hong Jen Yee experimented with Qt in early 2013 and released the first version of a Qt-based

PCMan File Manager PCMan File Manager (PCManFM) is a file manager application, developed by Hong Jen Yee () from Taiwan, which is meant to be a replacement for GNOME Files, Dolphin (file manager), Dolphin and Thunar. PCManFM is the standard file manager in LXDE, als ...

on 26 March 2013. He clarified, though, that this means no departure from GTK in LXDE, saying "The

and Qt versions will coexist". He later ported

Xrandr X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation. Implementations of the client-side X Window System protocol exist in the form of ''X11 libraries'', which serve a ...

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,

and LXDE announced that they had decided to merge the two projects. This merge meant that the GTK and the Qt versions coexisted in the short term, but eventually development of the GTK version was dropped and all efforts were 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. With the 0.13 release on 21 May 2018 the LXQt project formally split from

with the move to a separate

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

organization.

Software components

LXQt consists of many modular components, some of them depending on Qt and KDE Frameworks 5.

Adoption

Version history

References

External links