lxqt – Is there a current version of PCManFM-QT that’s ready to go?

You’ve not provided the essential release details.

(a) Lubuntu 21.10 with LXQt 0.17

You’re using an unsupported release of Lubuntu, thus upgrades are not available as we don’t support it. Lubuntu 21.10 is EOL

I suggest you re-install a supported system.

(b) Lubuntu 22.04 with LXQt 0.17

Lubuntu 22.04 that released with LXQt 0.17 as was announced, with the older LXQt from the prior release for the reasons as documented about by the Lubuntu team on the Lubuntu discourse (it was highlighted as a plea for more contributors!).

To upgrade it, you can use backports as the Lubuntu team have documented in numerous posts

basically

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lubuntu-dev/backports

but I’ll recommend you read the documentation, and warnings provided by the Lubuntu team.

Note: Upgrading to LXQt 1.2 or beyond will prevent you from being able to release-upgrade a 22.04 system to 22.10; only the earlier provided backported versions allowed for this (when backports increased beyond what 22.10 provided upgrade was no longer available); this will not impact upgrades to 24.04 or LTS to LTS in the future as we’ll not upgrade backports that far.