Razor-Qt Desktop Still Being Developed, v0.5 Is Near

While there hasn't been a new release since February, like the Trinity KDE 3.5 fork, the Razor-qt desktop environment continues to be actively developed. Razor-qt 0.5.0 will be released soon.

Razor-qt 0.4.1 is the latest stable release from February, but new code continues to be checked into this Qt-powered desktop on a near-daily basis. The commit activity to Razor-qt is available from its GitHub repository.

Razor-qt was announced last year as a lightweight, easy-to-use, fast desktop built upon Qt. "It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and intuitive interface. Unlike desktop environments, Razor-qt also works fine with weak machines."

Based upon recent commits, Razor-qt 0.5.0 should be near with a version 0.4.99 release candidate being tagged in Git just three days ago. There's also just two open issues for the 0.5 blocker per the mailing list discussion.

Among the changes coming up for Razor-qt 0.5.0 is a new LightDM greeter (razor-lightdm-greeter), razor-notificationd for handling desktop notifications, a razor-appearance GUI for supporting configuration theming, razor-globalkeyshortcuts for providing desktop shortcut configuration, better XDG standards support, a new implementation of configuration files, better integration with window managers from fvwm family, performance optimizations on the desktop, a notepad desktop widget, many new panel plug-ins, and much more.