LXQt 2.1 Released With New Wayland Session Component

LXQt 2.1 is now available as the latest feature release to this Qt-based lightweight desktop environment. Most significant with LXQt 2.1 is the introduction of the lxqt-wayland-session component.

LXQt 2.1 introduces lxqt-wayland-session as a means of supporting seven different Wayland sessions with two Wayland back-ends in LXQt-Panel. The seven sessions currently supported are for making use of the Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River or Niri compositors. The Wayland back-ends in LXQt-Panel are for KWin Wayland and general.

Today's LXQt 2.1 release announcement explains:

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

The Wayland support is considered optional and experimental with LXQt planning to continue supporting the X11 session indefinitely.

LXQt 2.1 also features various desktop improvements when running on Wayland, enabling the LXQt Panel taskbar under Wayland, configuration improvements, and some minor enhancements to its QTerminal terminal emulator.

Downloads and more details on the LXQt 2.1 release via GitHub.