Over five months after its previous 2.1 release, LXQt 2.2 has officially launched, bringing updates and improvements to this lightweight desktop environment powered by Qt.
One of the headline improvements is its enhanced Wayland support. The team has addressed a long-standing quirk in multi-screen setups by adopting screen names instead of screen numbers — a necessary shift, as Wayland does not define a “primary screen” in the traditional sense.
However, this change introduces a small caveat: desktop item arrangements will be reset for the first time under this protocol. Users sticking with X11 won’t be affected.
Additionally, the LXQt Wayland Session now tracks the latest stable versions of the Wayland compositors it supports, aligning better with the current ecosystem.
PCManFM-Qt, LXQt’s file manager, now allows custom terminal options, supports advanced string replacement during bulk renaming, and prevents accidental navigation when Backspace is held in the filter bar. A particularly user-friendly tweak is the improvement in the “Open With” menu — it now displays apps that can handle multiple file types simultaneously.
Additional usability changes include keyboard shortcuts like “Ctrl+Shift+NUMBER” for changing view modes and improved drag-and-drop behavior on the desktop, which minimizes the disruptive movement of surrounding icons.
The LXQt terminal experience has also received a noticeable upgrade. Text rendering — especially in tricky edge cases — has been improved, and new features like blinking text cursors and auto-hiding mouse cursors have been added.
In addition, a cleaner Preferences dialog and a more intuitive sub-terminal focus (on mouseover) round out the list of enhancements. The outdated app-level transparency setting has also been removed in favor of native terminal transparency.
Regarding multi-user system integrity, lxqt-session now blocks a second instance from starting under the same user account. There’s also a new D-Bus method for launching applications, a useful capability for users configuring global shortcuts under Wayland.
On the Power management side, with LXQt 2.2.0, power profiles (e.g., those managed by power-profiles-daemon) are now supported and can be accessed via the battery context menu. While this is currently limited to systems with a battery, future versions aim to make it available universally.
Moreover, lid-close behavior defaults to suspend, helping improve out-of-the-box laptop ergonomics.
The LXQt Panel joins other components in adopting Wayland screen names, while also offering new features such as custom text colors for the Custom Command widget and keyboard navigation enhancements in the Fancy Menu. Behind the scenes, debug messages have been reduced, and support for the now-obsolete menu cache has been dropped.
Lastly, LXQt Archiver now defaults to using 7zip for building and leverages 7z to handle RAR archives. Small UI improvements, like new menu-bar icons and link target previews, help polish the overall experience. And in preparation for the next-gen Qt stack, libqtxdg has been updated to accommodate internal changes in Qt 6.9.
Eager to try the new desktop environment? Unfortunately, at the time of writing, it is only available as source code, and no precompiled packages are available for the various Linux distros.
The good news, however, is that in the coming days and weeks, users of rolling-release distributions like Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Gentoo, etc., will be among the first to get and enjoy the new LXQt 2.2 desktop environment.
Refer to the release announcement for more information about all changes in the new version.
