The LXQt team announces the release of LXQt 2.5.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.

Highlights

General

The minimum required version of Qt is bumped to 6.10.0.
QTerminal and QTermWidget have received a lot of enhancements, including several new features (new background image modes, visual bell, OSC-8 hyperlink, silence notification, Shift+click selection, failed process communication, etc.) as well as bug-fixes.
LXQt does not depend on menu-cache anymore. It was the last LXDE dependency of LXQt. Now LXQt uses its own methods (in libfm-qt) to do the jobs of menu-cache, and it does them better and faster.
PCManFM-Qt’s search supports incremental listing (disabled by default), such that the user can stop a heavy search, by clicking a button in the status-bar, while keeping the current results. Also, an option is added to Desktop Preferences for not using a wallpaper cache, such that the original image quality can be displayed.
Also, lots of CMake maintenance and code cleanup have been done. Although users do not notice them, they are crucial to a better code quality.

NOTE: Unfortunately, libkscreen-6.8 dropped its X11 support and broke LXQt’s Monitor Settings. We will try to restore the X11 support by using X11 functions directly. A point release will be made when the code is ready.

LibFM-Qt / PCManFM-Qt

menu-cache is replaced by a built-in desktop-menu implementation.
Optional incremental searching is supported and a stop button is added to the status-bar. (Actually, LibFM-Qt supports incremental file listing now, but it is used only for searching because otherwise, it would take extra CPU time for no good reason.)
An option is added to Desktop Preferences for not using wallpaper cache.
A rare case of ghost items in the directory tree view is fixed.
The header of the detailed list view is made unmovable.
Cleanup and other small fixes.

QTerminal and QTermWidget

In addition to several fixes,

New background image modes are added.
Optional visual bell is implemented.
Shift+click is supported for selecting a range.
An action is added for maximizing the current sub-terminal.
An option is added for notifying the user when the output stops inside a minimized window (“silence notification”).
Options are added for OSC-8 hyperlinks.
Ending of a failed process is communicated by warning the user and allowing to save the history.
The D-Bus support is enhanced considerably.
And more …

LXQt Panel

Network Monitor Plugin now respects lxqt-panel’s icon size and can prefer system icons.
An option for the minimum width is added to Custom Command plugin.
The current brightness is shown in the tooltip of the backlight plugin.
Made the D-Bus task command work with auto-hiding panels.
Made the Close button the default button for config dialogs of relevant plugins.

And several other fixes and enhancements.