LXQt 2.5 brings Qt 6.10 support & enhanced QTerminal; cutting its final LXDE dependency

The LXQt team has released version 2.5 of its lightweight Qt-based desktop environment, headlined by a modernization push that includes a bump of the minimum required Qt version to 6.10. The release also marks a symbolic milestone for the project: LXQt no longer depends on menu-cache, the last remaining dependency inherited from its ancestor, the LXDE desktop. In its place, LXQt now relies on its own implementation built into libfm-qt, which the developers say handles the same tasks “better and faster”.

QTerminal and its companion library QTermWidget receive a substantial overhaul in this release, gaining a set of new features alongside numerous bug fixes. Among the additions are new background image modes, an optional visual bell, support for OSC-8 hyperlinks, a silence notification option that alerts users when output stops in a minimized window, and Shift+click selection of ranges. Terminal sessions can now also be maximized individually, and the ending of a failed process is communicated through a warning that lets users save their session history before it closes.

Rounding out the release, the file manager components LibFM-Qt and PCManFM-Qt replace menu-cache with the new built-in desktop-menu implementation and gain optional incremental searching plus a stop button in the status bar. On the LXQt Panel side, the Network Monitor plugin now respects the panel's icon size and can prefer system icons, the backlight plugin shows the current brightness in its tooltip, and the D-Bus task command works with auto-hiding panels. LibLXQt fixes a brightness-reading issue with AMD GPUs, while pavucontrol-qt implements Bluetooth codec selection and UI integration. One caveat accompanies the release: libkscreen-6.8 dropped X11 support, temporarily breaking LXQt's monitor settings, with a point release planned to restore the functionality.