Today we’ve released version 0.11.0 of LXQt as well as new releases of all other components maintained by the LXQt project except those covered by last week’s pre-release.

General

The release took longer than desirable for various reasons, but preparations were made to improve the release management as a whole. Releases will take place more frequently in the future, both regular ones and point releases, backporting important fixes whenever it makes sense. Probably we will not introduce a fixed release schedule like once every six months though, as this wouldn’t fit the development of LXQt.

Regarding documentation the GitHub wiki was improved, the repositories of all components maintained by the LXQt project now come with a README.md covering all relevant aspects including installation.

The most important changes for users and developers/packagers respectively are summed up below.

Users

The UX was improved by fixing a significant number of bugs. Some new components were introduced and some changes regarding configuration were made.

Under Openbox an LXQt specific configuration file ~/.config/openbox/lxqt-rc.xml is used from now on. Details are explained in the file README.md of lxqt-common to which this configuration file’s template belongs.
Repository lxqt-config was complemented with a tool to adjust the displays’ brightness.
lxqt-panel, the taskbar of LXQt, is now behaving well on multi-monitor systems. The main menu comes with a search feature. Its plugin-screensaver was providing the very same functionality as an invocation lxqt-leave --lockscreen (see lxqt-session). The latter is made available as item “Lock Screen” in the panel’s main menu by a desktop entry file and can as such be dragged into an instance of plugin-quicklaunch. The plugin was therefore abandoned, to ease the transition, preexisting instances are automatically replaced by an instance of plugin-quicklaunch featuring the said desktop entry file.
PCManFM-Qt, the file manager of LXQt which is in charge of the desktop management as well, has seen a lot of improvement of its UI, e. g. the placement of icons is much better and it’s possible to store settings per folder.
The release is introducing pavucontrol-Qt, the Qt port of PulseAudio’s mixer pavucontrol the UI of which is based upon GTK. Albeit developed for a short time only it’s already providing nearly all features of the latter.

Developers / packagers

Due to the long time since the last release there’s a rather large number of changes relevant for packaging. They’ll certainly make things easier in the long run but do require some attention for the moment.

The various issues server downloads.lxqt.org was suffering from in the past were fixed. Nevertheless we’ll provide the release archives in addition on GitHub at the usual paths github.com/lxqt/$COMPONENT/releases. We’ll provide xz archives only from now on. For this release they will be signed by a GPG key of Alf Gaida which in turn is signed by various Debian developers. In the future we plan to establish a dedicated LXQt release key which will be signed by LXQt team members.
In addition to the GitHub wiki and files README.md mentioned above, all repositories were complemented with a file ./CHANGELOG which sums up all commit messages since the predecessor release.
Translations of all components maintained by the LXQt project were summarized in a new repository lxqt-l10n. This was a first step to implement the usage of a system like Transifex or Pootle which is the long-term goal. Please see the repository’s README.md for instructions how to make use of it.
So far building some optional plugins of lxqt-panel or features thereof could be toggled by (not) providing their dependencies at build time. This was changed such that all available plugins (except plugin-dom which is intended for debugging only) and features are enabled by default. CMake will fail when dependencies are missing. These defaults can be adjusted by CMake variables, see the repository’s README.md.
The configuration tools provided by lxqt-admin are no longer relying on System Tools Backends / liboobs but on systemd-timedated and some scripts which in turn are by default using the shadow tools as backend. This should allow for a more widespread use of lxqt-admin. The old code was kept as fallback for systems lacking systemd, like BSD.
That aside, changes relevant for packaging were in particular made in lxqt-common, lxqt-powermanagement, lxqt-qtplugin, lxqt-runner and LXImage-Qt.