Lubuntu LXQT still not ready for release, but can be manually installed.

As it will be generally known, the Lubuntu community are working towards migrating their platform to Lxqt. I have been testing a whole lot of VMs running Lxqt as a desktop environment and it looks good even if it is incomplete.

I have run it on my bedroom computer using a test install but there are issues with the wireless drivers which I am unable to make work and it may be a question of trying to fix these up or moving to the stable release of Lubuntu 18.04 until such a time as I can install Lxqt on top of that as the packages are not currently available to work on top of Lubuntu 18.04.

Failing that I may have to go back to Xubuntu and see if I can put Lxqt on top of it as it will be nearly the same and should work well. The issue with Lubuntu is while they have been working on the new release they have pushed it back yet again.

I decided to reinstall with Lubuntu and then added the lxqt install from the package manager. To get it working I also had to separately install the sddm display manager. This resulted in a Plasma login screen but set to log in to the Lubuntu QT session. At the moment there is an issue with PulseAudio but otherwise it seems to work very well and the wireless even worked during installation. So it looks like apart from the odd glitch I have it working. The Plasma login screen which is really nice looking is an added bonus.

The audio indicator which also apparently stops the up and down volume controls on the keyboard working is not a big deal in that configuration because the hardware volume control in this case is easily accessible. Perhaps this is more an issue with LXQT and will be fixed in a future release. The wireless driver is a much bigger issue and to find that is properly addressed and works flawlessly is a much more major issue and I am pleased that is resolved. There may be a way I can get Kodi’s own volume controls to work with the keyboard in any case.

After doing some more work on this I uninstalled pulseaudio and are now using ALSA audio controls which seems to work perfectly and the volume control buttons on the keyboard also work properly and the master volume control for the system can also be set to full which produces much more output with a quiet audio source so that is what I have been able to make work with LXQT. So everything is great now.