LXQt 2.5.0 shipped today, with its newest feature release bumping the Qt floor to 6.10 and cutting its final LXDE tie by folding menu-cache into libfm-qt. The terminal stack took the brunt of the development, gaining background images, OSC-8 hyperlinks, a visual bell, and range selection. The maintainers also honestly flagged an X11 regression from libkscreen-6.8 and promised a point release to fix it. Available across virtually every major Linux distribution, the update keeps LXQt current without losing its lightweight ethos.

LXQt 2.5.0 ships with Qt 6.10 and finally cuts its last LXDE dependency

LXQt 2.5.0 is out. The lightweight desktop environment marked its November 5, 2026 release with a new Qt target and the end of its final tie to LXDE, both of which the maintainers are treating as coming-of-age milestones.

The headline changes are easy to summarize. LXQt now requires Qt 6.10 or newer, and it has dropped menu-cache, the last lingering dependency inherited from its LXDE predecessor, folding that functionality into libfm-qt instead. Not cheap in the sense of "nothing happened," but it's the kind of internal housekeeping that matters more for the next version than this one.

The real work, though, landed in the terminal. QTerminal and QTermWidget absorbed the bulk of the effort, picking up background image modes, OSC-8 hyperlinks, a visual bell, and a few other touches that make sitting at a prompt marginally nicer. Meanwhile PCManFM-Qt, the panel, audio controls, and system libraries got a handful of smaller, targeted tweaks.

Leaving LXDE behind

Here's the piece that gets the most attention, and it's a legitimate one. For years, menu-cache was the last thread connecting LXQt to its LXDE roots. It came over as part of the GTK-based LXDE stack, and LXQt just kept using it. Now the project implements the desktop-menu behavior itself inside libfm-qt, and the maintainers claim it does the same jobs "better and faster."

Whether that's strictly true is hard to verify from release notes alone. But it does mark a real symbolic boundary. LXQt didn't start as LXDE rewritten in Qt, that's a common misconception. It grew out of a 2013 merger between LXDE-Qt (Hong Jen Yee's early Qt front end for PCManFM) and Razor-qt, an independent lightweight desktop effort. The combined project ended up as something distinct, inheriting the philosophy of both parents. Dropping the last LXDE dependency is just the dependency side of that separation finally closing out.

The incremental search feature in PCManFM-Qt is worth a mention since it's one of the few things you'd actually notice day to day. It lists results as you type and lets you stop a heavy search midway by clicking a button in the status bar, keeping whatever's been gathered so far. The catch? It's disabled by default, because constant incremental listing would eat CPU outside of search. Sensible default. Head here to enable it if you want it.

The terminal gets the attention

QTerminal and QTermWidget got the most substantive additions, and for a terminal emulator in a lightweight desktop, this is genuinely useful rather than gimmicky. You can now apply wallpapers to the terminal through fill, corner, or tile modes, backed by a pixmap cache so it doesn't crawl. There's a Shift+Click range selection that matches what you'd expect from most other terminals, and a "silence notification" that pings you when output stops inside a minimized window. Handy if you're nursing a long-running compile and keep forgetting to peek.

Under the hood, QTermWidget picked up OSC-8 hyperlinks and man added to the allowed hyperlink protocols, plus a set of VT100 control-string parsing fixes and a bracketed-paste vulnerability patch. The maintainers also trimmed dead code for Qt versions that predate 6.7 and 6.9, silenced a bunch of warnings, and made the exit dialog window-modal.

A regression, admitted honestly

One thing LXQt did the right way was call out a problem upfront. The team explicitly flagged that libkscreen-6.8 dropped its X11 support, which broke LXQt's Monitor Settings on X11. They've promised to restore X11 support by calling X11 functions directly, and a point release is on the way. This doesn't affect Wayland sessions, so if you've moved off X11 you won't feel it at all.

Transparent upstream communication about a regression is genuinely rare. Most projects bury these until a distro maintainer files an angry bug report. LXQt just put it in the release notes.

On the practical side, bumping the Qt floor to 6.10 keeps LXQt current with the latest toolkit features and security fixes. However, at the same time, it raises the bar for distributions still shipping older Qt versions, and it means the upgrade cost lands partly on the distro packagers rather than on you. That's the trade-off with any desktop environment that chases a modern toolkit.

A couple of smaller things rounded out the update. pavucontrol-qt added Bluetooth codec selection so you can pick your codec from within LXQt's volume controls, LibLXQt fixed brightness reading on AMD GPUs, and there was general CMake maintenance scattered across the component stack that you'll never notice but that keeps the codebase sane.

A lighter option in a heavy week

LXQt 2.5.0 dropped in a busy stretch for desktops. Cinnamon 6.8 landed with new trackpad gestures, KDE Plasma was mid-cycle between 6.7.6 and the upcoming 6.9, and Hyprland shipped 0.57. Lightweight and modular environments haven't gone anywhere, even while GNOME and KDE get all the AI-laden glamour. LXQt still positions itself as the "won't get in your way" desktop for old hardware, minimal setups, and anyone who values a fast, classic interface over bells and whistles. It's arguably competing with those flashier options not on features but on restraint.

The release comes on LXQt's usual April/November cadence, so 2.5.0 is the fall feature drop and the next one should arrive around April 2027. The superproject and each component now live on their own GitHub release pages, and every major distribution, Debian, Ubuntu/Lubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch and its spins, Void, Mageia, Gentoo, FreeBSD, and more, carries it. Build-from-source guidance lives on the LXQt wiki.

Head here to the LXQt 2.5.0 release page to grab it, or check the individual component notes if you only want to update a specific piece. It's a steady, unglamorous release that mostly does the right things and keeps a lightweight desktop honest about its own bugs.