Razor-Qt, the lightweight alternative to KDE, has released version 0.5 of their desktop environment.  If you’re looking for a lightweight desktop environment that can use the pretty Oxygen look and integrate nicely with both Qt and Gtk applications, you might give the project a look.

From the announcement:

We’re proud to announce the release of Razor-qt 0.5, the lightweight Qt-based desktop environment.

This release features numerous improvements, bug fixes, and performance enhancements all across the board, as well as a number of newly-added components:

• Razor Notifications – a desktop notifications service
• Razor LightDM Greeter – a login interface for the LightDM diplay manager
• Razor Global Shortcuts – a service to launch commands using key shortcuts
• Razor OpenSSH Askpass – a graphical password prompt for ssh

The panel also gained several of new plugins:

• Volume control, with ALSA and PulseAudio backends
• Sensors, to monitor temperatures
• CPU monitor
• Network monitor
• Color picker

The runner can now launch custom commands as well as start VirtualBox machines.

The desktop now includes a Notepad plugin.

Other notable features include a battery meter for Razor Autosuspend, a redesigned Razor Control Center, and a Razor theme switcher.

Luckily, users of major distributions do not have to wait to give this release a shot!  Pre-built packages are available for many major RPM based distributions, and an Ubuntu PPA as well!

Installation in Ubuntu is incredibly easy, as always.  Just do the following:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:razor-qt/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install razorqt

Source | Razor-Qt Mailing-list