Setting up LXQt with KWin

#KWin and LXQt and VirtualBox

This guide describes how to set up KWin and LXQt.

I have tried to install a relative light version with only a small memory footprint of KWin. There might be a more elegant solution though. If someone has an idea, please let me know.

Install

1. choose LXQT as desktop environment

2. Install Kwin

sudo pacman -S kwin

5. Install Kwin system setting dialog This enanbles the Kwin setting dialog. You can access the setting by clicking in the upper left menu of a window. There you see more actions and in that menu you see

sudo pacman -S kde-cli-tools

The kwin settings tool is kcmshell5

Unfortuntely in the oment (Feb 2019) kcmshell5 requires libkworkspace.so which is in plasma-workspace only and so you get the whole kde-plasma installation anyway.

In that case you can also install systemsettings, the kde-settings.

Thetool to start the seuop is called kcmshell5

6. Kwin-Gtk compatibility -> is this still needed ? To change the theme of GTK apps in LXQt you need the LXDE appearance app. It has almost no dependencies, so it does not add much.

sudo pacman -S lxappearance In the lxappearance app you can chose the theme the gtk apps use.

7. To see gtk apps with the Kwin Breeze themes add

sudo pacman -S breeze-gtk

Fine tuning

In my installation I had trouble with changing apps using Alt-Tab. Looking into the logs it turned out an app called kglobalaccel5 was not running. I have no idea where this app should be started but adding it to the LXQt autostart did it for me.

add to LXQt autostart: Menu -> Preferences -> LXQT settings -> Session Settings In tab Autostart add kglobalaccel5 to LXQT Autostart

( If you still have trouble check the Kwin settings in tab Task switcher. The flag current activity has to be set to on )

Kwin - Openbox comparison

• Kwin has compositing build in
• Improved vsync
• startup size on my system (checked in htop) :

This is for a quite raw Kwin installation, maybe something could be optimized.

Install additional software

Here is an extensive list of programmes that work well with Qt5