LXQt desktop has, since early 2017, been an excellent desktop environment, thought to be suitable even for not-very-powerful laptop or desktop computers. At the other end of the spectrum, I installed it on an upper-end gaming computer and was able to run glxspheres64 at an impressive > 2000 fps. Below is a simple, step-by-step recipe for installing LXQt Desktop in both Debian- and Arch-based distributions.
1) Install a suitable distribution. I successfully have installed the LXQt desktop following the directions on this page in the Debian-based distributions Lubuntu-16.10, 17.04, and 17.10, and Ubuntu-17.10 and 18.04 and LXLE-16.04.1 and PureOS-8.0 and 10.0(beta). For a reason yet to be discovered, my script did not work for PureOS 9.0 . I also installed LXQt successfully in the Arch-based distribution Antergos-17.1 minimal distribution, which I don't believe is currently active.
2) Download et_install_lxqt_desk from our bash script download page. "chmod 755" the file so it is executable. Then, from a command line, change to the directory in which et_install_lxqt_desk resides and issue the command "./et_install_lxqt_desk". et_install_lxqt_desk should work for most Debian- and Arch-based distributions. Additionally, most non-newbies should be able to modify et_install_lxqt_desk to work with quite a few other distributions using the information provided here. In October, 2018, I found it necessary to install libjson-glib and libjson-glib-dev in order to successfully build LXQt desktop for the Debian derivative PureOS. I could find no independent documentation for this being necessary, but et_install_lxqt_desk was modified to include their installation. In January, 2019, LXQt-0.14 was installed for a Debian-based system with gcc-8 after adding a requirement for the package xorg-xserver-input-libinput-dev.
LXQt.org recommends sddm as the preferred display manager for the LXQt desktop. In my experience, LXQt desktop also works fine with lightdm or gdm3.
Remember: After downloading any of our scripts, it likely will be necessary to issue the command "chmod 755 SCRIPT" where SCRIPT is the name of the script, before being able to execute it.