A plan to migrate LXQt to Qt6 and Wayland has been published

[or1k]

The developers of the Qt Lightweight Desktop Environment ( LXQt ) have described the process of migrating to the Qt6 library and the Wayland protocol. Migration of all LXQt components to Qt6 is currently seen as the primary focus of the project. Once the migration is complete, support for Qt5 will be discontinued.

Most LXQt components are already ported to Wayland to some extent. Only the screen configurator, the screenshot program, and the global keyboard shortcut handler lack Wayland support. There are no plans to port the sudo wrapper to Wayland.

The results of the porting to Qt6 will be presented in the LXQt 2.0.0 release scheduled for April this year. In addition to internal changes, the new branch will offer by default a new application menu "Fancy Menu", which, in addition to categorizing applications, implements a summary view of all applications and adds a list of frequently used applications. In addition, the new menu has enhanced program search capabilities.

It is noted that the implementation of Wayland support will not lead to conceptual changes: the project will remain modular and will continue to adhere to the classic desktop organization. Similar to the support of various window managers, LXQt will be able to work with all composite managers based on the wlroots library, developed by the developers of the Sway user environment and providing basic functions for organizing the composite manager based on Wayland. The work of LXQt using Wayland was tested with the composite managers labwc, wayfire, kwin_wayland, sway and Hyprland. The best result was achieved with labwc.

The panel, desktop, file manager (PCmanFM-qt), image viewer (LXimage-qt), permission management system (PolicyKit), volume control component (pavucontrol, PulseAudio Volume Control) and global hotkeys handler are now fully migrated to Qt6. Not yet translated to Qt6 are the session manager, notification system, power management mechanism, configurator (appearance, screen, input devices, locales, file associations), and the interface for viewing running processes (Qps), terminal emulator (QTerminal), screenshot program (Screengrab), program launcher (Runner), sudo strapping, SSH password request interface (LXQt Openssh Askpass), FreeDesktop portal system (XDG Desktop Portal), and system settings and user management interface (LXQt Admin).

In terms of Wayland readiness, most of the above LXQt components have already been ported to Wayland to some degree. Only the screen configurator, the screenshot program, and the global keyboard shortcut handler lack Wayland support. There are no plans to port the sudo wrapper to Wayland.