Lubuntu begins preparations for the migration to Qt 6 and Wayland

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lubuntu logo

Without a doubt, Wayland has matured enough so that many of the Linux distributions, as well as applications and desktop environments, have taken the initiative to migrate to it.

And it is not for nothing, but within the various sources of consultation that I have, many of its authors point out that 2024 will be the year of Wayland, Well, although in 2023, which is about to end, we were able to notice a great movement in favor of Wayland, 2024 will bring a lot of good news for this protocol.

Until A few years ago using Wayland by default seemed crazy and more because of the big problems it presented, Ubuntu, Fedora (and some derivatives), Gnome and Unity at the time were among the few that were already betting on Wayland at the time, but due to the present problems and the immaturity of Wayland compared to Xorg, it took a few more years until today for Wayland to replace Xorg.

For their part, the Lubuntu developers had made the announcement some time ago towards the transition of using Wayland by default in the distribution. According to your plans at that time in 2018, said transition should have been completed in 2020, but it was not like that, since, as I mentioned above, Wayland at that time is far from being a replacement for Xorg.

Now, shortly after 5 years since said planning, The Lubuntu project developers now have everything necessary to comply with the change and have published a plan to migrate the distribution to Qt 6 and Wayland.

Developers They mention that support for an optional Wayland-based session will be available in Lubuntu 24.04. and will be enabled by default in Lubuntu 24.10. In parallel, work continues to integrate support for Wayland and Qt 6 into the LXQt user environment supplied in Lubuntu (the current version of LXQt 1.4 continues to be based on the Qt 5.15 branch, but the next version of LXQt is promised to be ported to Fourth 6 ).

It is worth mentioning that Other factors that influence changing Lubuntu to Wayland, is in the context of a general trend away from X11 in the distributions; For example, Ubuntu provides a Wayland-based session by default as of version 22.04, Fedora 40 approved the end of support for X11, in addition to the possibility of removing support for X11 in KDE sessions based on X11, GNOME and GTK and Red Hat will completely stop supplying the However, Lubuntu maintainers intend to provide optional support for X11-based sessions until version 26.04, unless Ubuntu developers remove the X server from the repository before then.

The report also talks about the development of Lubuntu's own installer, built on the Calamares framework, which uses the Qt library to create the user interface. It should be noted that the new installer proposed in Ubuntu is based on the Flutter library, and the old Ubiquity installer is designed to use GTK or integrate with KDE components that are not used in the LXQt environment. Furthermore, Calamares is ahead of the installers developed by the Ubuntu project in terms of interface performance and installation speed, and is also better suited to Lubuntu themes.

In preparation for the release of Lubuntu 24.04, added support for a customization menu to the installer, Three installation modes were implemented (minimal without snapd, normal and complete with additional applications), a first home screen was added where you can choose between starting the Live environment and the installer.

Non-installation related improvements include addition of a graphical interface for Bluetooth control, an SDDM display manager settings editor, a night color mode, and an optional Windows 11-style theme.

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link


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