Just in time for the final release of the Qt 5.11 open-source and cross-platform application framework, the LXQt 0.13.0 desktop environment has been released this week with various improvements.

LXQt a.k.a the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment, it a fork of the old-school LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) built against the Qt application framework instead of GTK+ and has been in development for since 2013. The latest release, LXQt 0.13.0, brings more polishing to the desktop environment and other exciting changes.

For starters, all of LXQt's components are now ready to be built against the recently released Qt 5.11 application framework, and out-of-source-builds are now mandatory. LXQt 0.13.0 also disabled the menu-cached functionality, making it optional from now on in both the panel and runner, thus preventing memory leaks and avoiding any issues that may occur when shutting down or restarting LXQt.

Coming soon to Lubuntu 18.10

The LXQt 0.13.0 release also brings better performance and more flexibility to the lightweight desktop environment used by Linux-based operating systems by making the libfm-qt component less dependent on the libfm library. Also, the LXQtCompilerSettings component received various improvements and both the screengrab and qps components are now part of the LXQt brand.

Another interesting change implemented in LXQt 0.13.0 is the fact that the desktop environment's default configurations were moved to the /usr/share/lxqt directory. However, OS vendors can override the location to /etc/lxqt if it's more convenient to them. Also, the overall translations were improved in this release, which is available for download as source tarballs now.

Now that the Lubuntu operating system finally moved to LXQt as default desktop environment instead of LXDE, its development team is working hard these days to upgrade it to the LXQt 0.13.0 release. Developer Simon Quigley told us that he plans to make Lubuntu 18.10 the first GNU/Linux distribution with the LXQt 0.13.0 desktop environment by default and working out-of-the-box.