When comparing LXQT vs dwm, the Slant community recommends dwm for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop environments for Arch Linux?” dwm is ranked 7th while LXQT is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose dwm is:
Dwm is a low-resource window manager that is entirely simplistic in design.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Modular
By taking advantage of the modular KDE Frameworks, LXQT is able to offer a modular architecture that allows the user to easily swap components.
Pro Lightweight emphasis
With a focus on being "light-weight", it is to KDE Plasma what XFCE is to GNOME: a familiar enough looking lighter alternative to the more fully featured environment that may work better on lower-end devices and for people who want as lean a system as possible.
Pro Beautiful GUI using Qt.
Pro Great for old and low-end devices
LXQt is unparalleled in its ability to run on the weakest of machines without a problem.
Pro Utilizes Qt
As the name suggests, LXQt takes advantage of the Qt ecosystem to provide a beautiful and performant user experience.
Pro Doesn't use GTK3
Pro Doesn't use GTK3
Pro Simple and small
Dwm is a low-resource window manager that is entirely simplistic in design.
Pro Encourages user modification
Dwm is part of the suckless suite of tools, and encourages users to extend and configure it by modifying the code itself. To this end, dwm is kept under 2000 SLOC, and is an exemplar of clean, readable code (C). This, while giving users all the flexibility they could ask for, also makes dwm as lightweight as possible, and means that users have a full understanding of how it works.
Pro XRandR/Xinerama support
Dwm has support for XRandR and Xinerama, allowing for multi-monitor support.
Pro Many and unique patches available
Thanks to the small codebase, many users contributed patches to the suckless website. They offer unique functionality, e.g. swallow or fakefullscreen, that is not seen in many other WMs.
Pro Sane defaults
Uses Master&Stack layout by default.
Pro Minimalist
Small and easy to digest source for those who want to patch it.
Pro Easy to configure
Configuring dwm is straight-forward thanks to its config.h file (though it will have to be rebuilt for the effects to take place).
Pro Fast
Feels even faster than others minimal window manager.
Pro Very customizable
The clean code and the patches allow us to configure dwm to be exactly what we want.
Pro Default keybindings and functionality are very useful and well thought-out
An example of this is the application of alt-tab to switch between two tags.
Pro No glitches
Imagine a window manager that works perfectly in every situation. No glitches, no delays, no slow downs, no focus problems. Even the best window managers out there have glitches but dwm. Dwm works flawless.
Pro Useful and informative status bar
The dwm status bar can be set to display all kinds of useful information, such as volume level, wifi signal strength, and battery notification.
Pro Application grouping with tags
Dwm's design paradigm is to use tags to group clients (applications) that can then be pulled into a view (workspace); this allows you to view multiple clients at once and to assign or reassign those tags and their related views on the fly.
Contrary to most other window managers, when you view a tag you are not ‘visiting’ a workspace: you are pulling the tagged windows into a single workspace.
Combined with rules in the config.h
, this makes for a flexible and responsive means to manage your workflow.
Cons
Con Poor file manager
pcmanfm-qt is lightyears behind its GTK version.
Con Very limited in customization
Very few themes available, especially modern themes.
Con Ugly
Con Multiple application sources
Which leads to an inconsistent desktop.
Con Not a full desktop environment
Like LXDE or Xfce it is not a full desktop envirnment and is missing many utilities that need to be borrowed from other desktops which will bloat the desktop.
Con UHD screens hardly supported
DPI settings are not adopted. The readability, usability of this DE on UHD screens is not advisable. Fonts are not scaled at all.
Con Unthemeable for usual users
As all Qt desktop environments themeing is hard since you need to know C++ , there is a sideway using qss however its not as powerful as GTK, Enlightenment or Windows theming.
Con Depends too much on KDE
Even the programs/apps shipped with LXQt are from the KDE project. They don't have their own projects yet.
It's pretty similar to Budgie that depends on Gnome for almost everything.
Con Pcmanfm-qt needs gvfs
you can mount drives with mount, but pcmanfm uses gnomes gvfs to mount drives.
Con Missing Features = Lightweight
For the LXQT developers, lightweight is a synonym for missing features.
Con A lot of bugs
This is a very disappointing desktop environment, it's very buggy. Although there still is hope that these issues will be resolved.
Con Not quite ready for open deployment
In the current state, LXQT is a beta desktop that feels like a heavy alpha. A lot of the tools and underlying features are in a testing state, while the LXQT project itself has not had a gold (1.0.0) release as of yet.
Con No runtime config file
There is no config file that can be edited after the window manager is compiled: all changes need to be made prior to compiling.
Con By developers, for developers
Basic knowledge of C language, general programming, and compilation are all required.
Con The patch system breaks the code
To add features one has to patch the original code. That maybe easy to do with only one patch, but things can go down hill after 3+ patches, specially for those who don't know how to code on C.
Con More latency
It uses Xlib instead of XCB.
Con X11 only
X11 is outdated and insecure, there are Wayland clones such as Velox and dwl, but dwm still takes the cake.