LXQt

A lightweight Qt-based desktop environment.

LXQt is a lightweight Qt-based desktop environment, born in 2013 from the merger of LXDE-Qt and Razor-qt. It provides a complete desktop experience with low resource consumption, which makes it a sensible choice for older hardware, ARM single-board computers, and minimal installations where users want a graphical environment but cannot afford the memory footprint of GNOME or KDE Plasma.

LXQt 2.0 (2024) was a significant release that moved away from KDE Frameworks 5 and onto Qt 6. The transition was less invasive than KDE Plasma's because LXQt does not rely on the larger KDE software stack — most LXQt components are standalone Qt applications.

LXQt is the default desktop on Lubuntu, Manjaro LXQt, and several smaller distributions. It is widely used to revive older hardware or to set up lightweight desktops in education and maker projects (small Linux SBCs in classrooms, kiosk-style machines, etc.) where booting fast and feeling responsive matters more than visual polish.

License: GPL-2.0-or-later (mostly)

Category: Desktop

Website: https://lxqt-project.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install lxqt
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install @lxqt-desktop
Arch:          sudo pacman -S lxqt

Authors

LXQt project (merger of Razor-qt and LXDE)

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