I have looked through all of the settings and can’t find where to have the mouse cursor change to an hourglass or actually any type of loading indicator when starting an application. I’m on LXQt v1.2.0
I personally don’t mind it but I have seen other users continually double click a desktop icon because they think they may have double clicked too slow and then multiple instances open because of the launching delay - mainly the initial firefox snap launch.
This issue surfaced in 2014 and was supposed to be fixed.
It’s related to the “StartupNotify” flag inside a .desktop file.
When it’s ‘true’, the launcher informs the gio backend (gtk glib) which is supposed to put up the busy cursor and the launcher listens for the app to report back. After, the cursor is supposed to change back to normal.
It doesn’t work with pcmanfm, it’s desktop nor it’s Qt counterparts.
The problem is that not many people notice it or maybe don’t care, so it gets by un-noticed.
(Infact I remember there was an opposite bug with 18.04 in which the mouse busy cursor would not go away for 30s after a launch and the only way to get rid of it was to map the busy cursor to a normal cursor!). This means that some people out there are probably glad that an app launch does not trigger a busy cursor).
Others in the past have suggested to just swap out openbox for some other WM. But I have seen it does work in a pure openbox session, and it does work for other file-managers (e.g SpaceFM), so I don’t think it’s an openbox issue (anymore).
It remains a mystery (to me) because the libfm-qt code (same legacy libfm support) does look like it’s doing it’s thing.
Yet, it doesn’t work (?).
Unless you’re using the Lubuntu Backports repo, the LXQt developers will probably not appreciate a bug report about a bug occurring in Lubuntu 22.04. This is because Lubuntu 22.04 uses an older version of LXQt, and many developers prefer verifying and working on bugs that happen on the latest versions of their software.
What would be helpful is if you could file a bug report in Ubuntu. We actually like working with older software versions, since that’s what we ship. You can probably get the bug report process started by running ubuntu-bug libfm-qt in a terminal. Follow the on-screen instructions (you will need to have or create an Ubuntu One account). Having bug reports helps us keep track of what’s wrong with Lubuntu so that we can help fix it. We can verify if the bug is occurring in the latest version of LXQt and send a bug report to LXQt if it is happening.
You could also install Lubuntu Lunar 23.04 in a virtual machine or on a test system, and then verify that the bug is happening there. If that’s the case, then you can go directly to LXQt with the bug report, since Lubuntu Lunar currently uses the latest version of LXQt at the time of this writing.