The LXDE and Razor-qt teams are proud to announce LXQt 0.7.0, the first release of LXQt, the Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment. This beta release is considered a stable continuation of the Razor desktop. It has been almost a year since the Razor-qt project and the LXDE-Qt project decided to merge. Since then, the LXQt desktop has been under active development by 13 developers and dozens of contributors and translators. "The Linux community sees many forks but never any merges." The merge has been praised by a lot of members of this community. The Maui Project has joined our efforts in creating a better Qt desktop and together we hope to focus less on our differences and more on what we share. The KDE Project has, in their efforts in building the modular KDE Frameworks, opened new doors for Qt developers working with desktop libraries. KF5 libraries may soon power some LXQt components! In the same spirit, I would like other desktops to consider this an open invitation to come and talk to us about how we could benefit from each other's work. Since the last release of Razor-qt (0.5.2), the desktop has had serious overall polishing and hundreds of bug fixes, as well as a host of new features including: - The inclusion of PCManFM-Qt, the Qt port of LXDE's desktop and file manager - An all-new modular architecture, allowing users and maintainers to easily swap out components of the desktop for third party apps. - Several improvements to the system settings along with the inclusion of screens management, keyboard settings and file associations. - Improvements to cursor and appearance settings - Improved support for systemd-based setups - Ongoing work on Qt 5 compatibility. Most of our components already build on Qt 5! - Ongoing work on Wayland support. Some components, including PCManFM-Qt, can run on Wayland if QtWayland is available. - A new obconf-qt tool, for Openbox users (released separately) - A new compton-conf tool, for Compton users (released separately) - Several performance improvements - Experimental Raspberry Pi support - Partial FreeBSD support Existing LXDE users will be happy to hear that the GTK version of LXDE will not be discontinued for the time being. While several developers have shifted their focus on LXQt, classic LXDE will continue being maintained as long as there are developers still working on it. The new website for the LXQt project is available at: * http://lxqt.org/ Source downloads for LXQt are available at: * http://lxqt.org/downloads/0.7.0/ Please report any issues to our main issue tracker. * https://github.com/lxde/lxde-qt Packages are already available for the following distributions: * Arch Linux (AUR): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/lxqt-desktop-git/ * Ubuntu (Daily Builds PPA): https://launchpad.net/~gilir/+ppa-packages * Siduction: http://packages.siduction.org/lxqt Distributions are encouraged to contact us on this mailing list regarding packaging matters. Our git repositories are available on: * http://git.lxde.org/ * https://github.com/lxde/ (read-only mirror) Aspiring contributors should take a look at our CONTRIBUTING document: * https://github.com/lxde/lxde-qt/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING The LXDE and LXQt developers