Release LXQt 2.1.0

The LXQt team announces the release of LXQt 2.1.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.

Through its new component lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0 supports 7 Wayland sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri), has two Wayland back-ends in lxqt-panel (one for kwin_wayland and the other general), and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not limited to X11 — i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. The sessions are available in the new section Wayland Settings inside LXQt Session Settings. At least one supported Wayland compositor should be installed in addition to lxqt-wayland-session for it to be used.

There is still hard work to do, but all of the current LXQt Wayland sessions are quite usable; their differences are about what the supported Wayland compositors provide:

• Labwc provides the most stable session, is very lightweight, neat and configurable, and has an extremely helpful and responsive team.
• Perhaps the most complete Wayland session is provided by KWin when extra KDE packages are installed. For now, it is the only Wayland compositor that supports LXQt Panel’s desktop switcher and LXQt Power Manager’s settings for turning off the monitor (see the Wayland Wiki for the latter).
• In additon to Kwin, fancy effects are also provided by Wayfire and Hyprland, the latter being one of the 4 tiling WMs to choose from.

Anyway, the best result is achieved by installing the latest stable version of the chosen Wayland compositor. Wayland users need to get familiar with Wayland counterparts of some X11 tools and the configuration of the compositor. They may use X11 apps through XWayland, but using apps that work directly on Wayland is the best choice. Also, see the Wayland Wiki.