An LXDE-like desktop made with Qt

Kheng Ho Toh, 123RF

Let There Be Light

Ferdinand Thommes

LXQt is a lightweight desktop environment based on Qt 5. The similarities to LXDE are no accident.

When dealing with Linux desktops, the letter "L" usually stands for "light." This is especially true for the two lightweight X11 desktop environments, LXDE and LXQt. Actually, the latter is halfway to becoming a complete desktop environment, as is apparent from its current version 0.11.0. However, you shouldn't let the halfway mark fool you into thinking that LXQt is anything other than absolutely usable in its current state of development. I discuss this status below.

LXDE and Razor-qt

Before delving into that topic, I want to first provide a brief overview of how the program came into being. Developers started the desktop project LXDE [1] in 2006, taking it upon themselves to create a lightweight desktop based on GTK. It was supposed to consume fewer resources than even XFCE, which was already very lean.

In 2010, some Russian developers took note of the project. They appreciated the features that KDE and the Qt framework brought to the table, but they wanted a more lightweight version. They started the Razor-qt project [2] based on Qt 4. Progress was comparatively slow due to time restrictions experienced by the project participants.

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