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Miscellaneous

Autostart Applications on Login#

Launching applications at the beginning of LXQt sessions is implemented according to the XDG Autostart Specification.

Basically this means suitable desktop entry files have to be placed in ~/.config/autostart/.
These files can be handled manually or from configuration dialogue LXQt Session Settings (binary lxqt-config-session) which belongs to lxqt-session.

For an explanation of terms "Global Autostart" and "LXQt Autostart" see section Autostart in the repository's README.md.
Note this distinction is currently suffering from a problem addressed in issue lxqt#746.

LXQt Modules#

Under "Session settings" it is possible to start/stop and enable/disable single modules. Any application which contains X-LXQt-Module=true in its .desktop file in /usr/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications will be handled as a module. This can be useful for applications like compositors (compton or picom) and similar.

See also lxqt-project.org/blog/2022/09/20/about-modules-in-lxqt/.

Default Applications#

The default browser, email client and file manager can be set by using File Associations dialog (lxqt-config-file-associations) → Default Applications.

LXQt's command-line tool for manipulating MIME type associations and default applications is qtxdg-mat, provided by qtxdg-tools. It can also set the default terminal. See qtxdg-mat --help for details.

Note

The default terminal used by PCManFM-Qt should be set in its Preferences dialog → Advanced.

LXQt Filedialog in GTK Applications#

Requires xdg-desktop-portal-lxqt.

  • Firefox version 98 and higher: Open in the address bar about:config, search for "portal" and set both widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker and widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.mime-handler from 2 to 1.
  • Thunderbird: Preferences > Configuration Editor widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal has to be set to 1.
  • Some other GTK applications can be started with GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 application

A general use of GTK_USE_PORTAL=1 in ~/.profile or /etc/profile can lead to issues and is not recommended.

For details see https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/portals.conf.html

LXQt Panel#

Settings are accessible by right click on free space on the panel or its plugins (except window buttons in task manager) and can be blocked completely checking the last item to prevent accidental changes or removals of plugins.

Plugins can be configured either by right click or by Panel Settings → Plugin → icon "..."

Plugin Keyboard-Indicator#

It is possible to show country flags instead of the ISO code for the keyboard layout installing iso-flags-svg or iso-flags-png if provided by the distribution in use. An independent set can be found here. The path to the folder containing the flags has to be configured manually, example /usr/share/iso-flags-svg/country-4x3/%1.svg.

Right click the panel's "Main Menu" or "Fancy Menu" widget and choose Configure → Menu File. The following files belong to LXQt: * lxqt-applications-fm.menu: Used by PCManFM-Qt in menu://Applications; not quite relevant to lxqt-panel. * lxqt-config.menu: used by "Configuration Center"; not relevant to lxqt-panel. * lxqt-applications.menu: The default menu. * lxqt-applications-compact.menu Can be used in both Mainmenu and Fancymenu, in Mainmenu it will generate a two-level layout.

[!Note] lxqt-applications-compact.menu does not display a probable "Wine" category because ~/.config/menus/applications-merged does not match "compact". Renaming it to "compact-merged" will fix that.

LXQt 2.3 and later: * lxqt-panel-applications.menu Default menu for Fancymenu.

Add, modify or hide Menu Entries#

  • For adding a new menu entry, the directory ~/.local/share/applications/ can be opened in PCManFM-Qt and a new desktop entry can be created in it by using Tools → Create Launcher.
  • For modifying an existing menu entry, the application's .desktop file can be copied from /usr/share/applications/ to ~/.local/share/applications/ and then edited. Changes will not be lost with updates.
  • For hiding an existing menu entry, the application's .desktop file can be copied from /usr/share/applications/ to ~/.local/share/applications/ and then edited by adding the line NoDisplay=true. Changes will not be lost with updates.

See also lxqt-project.org/blog/2022/06/18/menu-editing-in-lxqt/.

Power Profiles#

With LXQt ≥ 2.2, if power-profiles-daemon is installed, the available profiles can be changed by right clicking the battery icon.

LibreOffice / OpenOffice vs. environment variable SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN#

Neither of these office suites uses one of the well-known widget toolkits like GTK or Qt by default but sticks with its custom "Visual Components Library (VCL)". Integrating with the former is handled by components called plugins.

A choice among the available plugins is made by setting the environment variable SAL_USE_VCLPLUGIN, which accepts the values gen ("generic", hence no use of plugins / native VCL UI), gtk3, gtk4, kf6 (KDE), qt5 and qt6. System defaults are set by files /etc/profile.d/libreoffice-<flavour>.<shell>. Alternatively, in LXQt, the variable can be set in LXQt Session Settings under "Advanced". By default it is not set this way, but if set, it supersedes other means to tweak the variable.

Note the support of the Qt ecosystem is rather poor. Unlike in GTK there's no interaction with the widget toolkit itself but with KDE libraries in an outdated version only. In particular it is currently not possible to use the generic Qt file chooser dialogues with LibreOffice or OpenOffice.
Also, enabling a certain plugin does not guarantee that its corresponding backend will be activated, because that backend should first be installed independently.