Discover the LXQT Desktop Environment

LXQT is a light weight and a highly modular desktop environment. If you want to try it out you can use lubuntu, a flavour of ubuntu which comes with lxqt installed.

Components of lxqt desktop environment

lxqt is modular desktop environment. It has following components:

• lxqt-panel a light weight customizable panel
• openbox window manager
• PCManFM-Qt file manager
• featherpad text editor
• sddm login manager

and mostly other components are also lightweight qt programs.

Multiple sessions of lxqt present in sddm login manager.

When you login in using sddm login manager you will encounter drop-down to select different lxqt sessions, which can be confusing. For each of these options there is a file associated in /usr/share/xsessions, which contains information about how to start the session and it's name.

Lubuntu Session

This is associated with the file /usr/share/xsessions/lubuntu.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Lubuntu
Comment=Lubuntu session using LXQt
Exec=env LXQT_DEFAULT_OPENBOX_CONFIG="/etc/xdg/xdg-Lubuntu/openbox/lxqt-rc.xml" /usr/bin/startlxqt
Type=Application

So for Exec option we can see that lubuntu session use openbox window manager with the config file ~/.config/openbox/lxqt-rc.xml and it is not the default config for openbox.

lxqt Session

This is associated with the file /usr/share/xsessions/lxqt.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=startlxqt
TryExec=lxqt-session
Name=LXQt Desktop
Comment=Lightweight Qt Desktop

This also uses the default openbox window manger but with the default openbox config file ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml.

So each session has a different openbox config file. So use Lubuntu session as it will more customized by default.

References

• lubuntu official site
• lxqt official site