Author Archives: Aaron Rainbolt

23 Apr

Lubuntu 26.04 LTS Released!

Thanks to the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 26.04 LTS has been released. With the codename Resolute Raccoon, Lubuntu 26.04 is the 30th release of Lubuntu, the 16th release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

Download and Support Lifespan

With Lubuntu 26.04 being a long-term support interim release, it will follow the standard LTS support period of three years, and will be supported until April 2029.

You can download Lubuntu 26.04 here. If you would like to upgrade your existing 25.10 installation, please visit our manual page describing the process.

What’s new since 24.04 LTS?

LXQt

LXQt 2.3 is now shipped by default. More information on its release can be found here: 2.3.0

2048-qt

2048-qt is somewhat broken in Ubuntu 26.04 and therefore was removed from Lubuntu. See the Resolute Beta release notes for details.

rust-coreutils and sudo-rs

Many of the GNU coreutils were replaced by Rust equivalents in Ubuntu 25.10. The traditional sudo system was similarly replaced with a Rust rewrite. Ubuntu 26.04 is the first LTS release to ship with Rust-based coreutils and sudo. See the 25.10 release notes for details.

LXQt 2.0 and Qt 6, Kvantum theming

Lubuntu 26.04 is the first LTS release of Lubuntu to ship with a primarily Qt 6-based environment. Qt 6 applications should now be themed nicely, instead of looking somewhat drab like they once did. Recent versions of LXQt also come with a much improved application menu, “Fancy Menu”, which we have switched to. We also use Kvantum as our theming engine instead of Breeze. See the 25.04 release notes and 24.10 release notes and for details.

Artwork

As usual, new releases come with new artwork, and this time around our artwork contributors provided a combination of hand-drawn and fractal artwork for our wallpaper and login screen.

A raccoon climbing a tree looks out at the starry night sky and galaxy above

Blue waves flow in turbulent but delicate patterns over a dark background

Known Issues

  • KWallet and KWalletManager are being installed by default instead of gnome-keyring: Bug link
  • Alacritty is being installed alongside QTerminal: Bug link

Common Release Notes

Please also check the Ubuntu Release Notes for more common issues and bugs affecting all Ubuntu flavors.

What is Lubuntu?

Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock-solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu provides a simple but modern and powerful graphical user interface, and comes with a wide variety of applications so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive. You can find the following major applications and toolkits installed by default in this release:

You can find a variety of other applications installed which aim to enhance your experience while staying out of the way of your normal workflow. New features and bugfixes in core Ubuntu components can be found here.

Lubuntu Manual

The Lubuntu Team has been hard at work in polishing the Lubuntu Manual to make it easy for new and experienced users alike to use their system more productively. The manual can be found at manual.lubuntu.me. We want to thank Lyn Perrine for all the hard work she has put into the Lubuntu Manual. Thank you!

Versions of the Lubuntu Manual:

While the documentation for previous releases will be kept in the Git repository, they will not be published anywhere.

Want an easy way to access the manual? Just double-click the “Lubuntu Manual” icon on the desktop.

Lubuntu Project

How can I help?

We can always use more help! No matter your skill level or your technical experience, there’s something you can help with that can make a huge difference in Lubuntu. Join us on our Matrix chat and talk to us there. Whether you know another language, have some spare time to help us test Lubuntu, are good at writing documentation, or just want to stay “in the know,” that is the place to be. More information about contributing can be found here. If you want to contribute to Lubuntu but do not feel you have the time or skills, consider buying a t-shirt or donating to Lubuntu. Another great method to get involved is bug reporting. If you notice an issue, please file a bug using the instructions on the Lubuntu Wiki. Don’t want to file a bug? Let us know what the problem is (in detail, enough that we can reproduce it) and we can assist you in filing one or do it ourselves.

Contributors

We would like to thank the following contributors for dedicating their time to Lubuntu this cycle. Thank you!

We’d also like to thank previous (and hopefully future!) contributors to the Lubuntu project. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you!

We also wanted to give a special mention to Julien Lavergne, our Project Lead Emeritus and Founder. Without you, the Lubuntu project would not exist. Thank you.

Global Team

The Lubuntu Global Team has been created to foster communities in non-English languages and locales. An up-to-date list of our communities can be found on our Links page, but the existing groups include: Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Arabic, and French. If you would like to start a language group, join our development channel and talk with the Global Team. At minimum, you should have a few interested drivers of the community, and at least one administrator that speaks English.

27 Mar

Lubuntu Resolute Beta Released!

Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 26.04 Beta has been released. With the codename Resolute Raccoon, Lubuntu 26.04 will be the 30th release of Lubuntu, the sixteenth release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

Support lifespan

With 26.04 being an LTS release, it will follow the standard LTS support period of three years, which means 26.04 will be supported until April 2029. Please note that 26.04 is still in Beta, and is not officially supported until its scheduled release on April 23, 2026.

You can download 26.04 Beta here. If you would like to upgrade your existing 24.04 LTS or 25.10 installation, please visit our manual page describing the process.

Known Issues and Notable Changes

LXQt

LXQt 2.3 is now shipped by default. More information on its release can be found here: 2.3.0

2048-qt

For many cycles, we have included a single game as part of the base Lubuntu installation, 2048-qt. Unfortunately, the application has since become unmaintained, and the existing code’s endgame mechanism is broken on Ubuntu. To avoid shipping broken things as part of an LTS release, we have removed 2048-qt from Lubuntu 26.04.

Users who enjoy playing 2048 are encouraged to investigate some of the alternative versions available in the Ubuntu archive, such as “2048” (a text-mode implementation of the game), and GNOME 2048 (a GUI version). Alternatively, 2048-qt still exists in the Ubuntu archive and can be installed if desired (though one will still have to live with the broken endgame issue).

Known Issues

  • On systems that use the text-mode Plymouth boot screen (mainly BIOS systems), the OS may report itself as “Lubuntu 25.04”.
  • KWallet and KWalletManager are being installed by default instead of gnome-keyring: Bug link
  • Alacritty is being installed alongside QTerminal: Bug link

Common Release Notes

Please also check the Ubuntu Release Notes for more common issues and bugs affecting all Ubuntu flavors.

Wayland plans

While the software needed for a decent Wayland session is present in Ubuntu 26.04, we were not able to start work on a Wayland session in time to include it in the Ubuntu archive or on the Lubuntu ISO. If we do manage to work on a Wayland session for 26.04, it will most likely be offered as a PPA. We will announce its availability here if this materializes.

What is Lubuntu?

Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock-solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu provides a simple but modern and powerful graphical user interface, and comes with a wide variety of applications so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive. You can find the following major applications and toolkits installed by default in this release:

You can find a variety of other applications installed which aim to enhance your experience while staying out of the way of your normal workflow. New features and bugfixes in core Ubuntu components can be found here.

Lubuntu Manual

The Lubuntu Team has been hard at work in polishing the Lubuntu Manual to make it easy for new and experienced users alike to use their system more productively. The manual can be found at manual.lubuntu.me. We want to thank Lyn Perrine for all the hard work she has put into the Lubuntu Manual. Thank you!

Versions of the Lubuntu Manual:

While the documentation for previous releases will be kept in the Git repository, they will not be published anywhere.

Want an easy way to access the manual? Just double-click the “Lubuntu Manual” icon on the desktop.

Lubuntu Project

How can I help?

We can always use more help! No matter your skill level or your technical experience, there’s something you can help with that can make a huge difference in Lubuntu. Join us on our Matrix chat and talk to us there. Whether you know another language, have some spare time to help us test Lubuntu, are good at writing documentation, or just want to stay “in the know,” that is the place to be. More information about contributing can be found here. If you want to contribute to Lubuntu but do not feel you have the time or skills, consider buying a t-shirt or donating to Lubuntu. Another great method to get involved is bug reporting. If you notice an issue, please file a bug using the instructions on the Lubuntu Wiki. Don’t want to file a bug? Let us know what the problem is (in detail, enough that we can reproduce it) and we can assist you in filing one or do it ourselves.

Contributors

We would like to thank the following contributors for dedicating their time to Lubuntu this cycle. Thank you!

We’d also like to thank previous (and hopefully future!) contributors to the Lubuntu project. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you!

We also wanted to give a special mention to Julien Lavergne, our Project Lead Emeritus and Founder. Without you, the Lubuntu project would not exist. Thank you.

Global Team

The Lubuntu Global Team has been created to foster communities in non-English languages and locales. An up-to-date list of our communities can be found on our Links page, but the existing groups include: Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Arabic, and French. If you would like to start a language group, join our development channel and talk with the Global Team. At minimum, you should have a few interested drivers of the community, and at least one administrator that speaks English.

09 Oct

Lubuntu 25.10 (Questing Quokka) Released!

The Lubuntu Team is proud to announce Lubuntu 25.10, codenamed Questing Quokka. Lubuntu 25.10 is the 29th release of Lubuntu, the 15th release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

Download and Support Lifespan

With 25.10 being an interim release, it will follow the standard non-LTS support period of nine months; this means that Lubuntu 25.10 will be supported until July 2026. Our development focus going forward will be on Lubuntu 26.04 and future releases, so only critical bugfixes and security updates will be provided. If you’re a 25.04 user, please upgrade to 25.10 as soon as possible.

Installation

You can download Lubuntu 25.10 here. If you would like to upgrade your existing 25.04 installation, please visit our manual page describing the process. Common Ubuntu instructions can be found here.

New in Lubuntu 25.10

LXQt

LXQt 2.2 is now shipped by default. More information on its release can be found here: 2.2.0

rust-coreutils

Starting in Ubuntu 25.10, Ubuntu now uses the uutils Rust implementation of coreutils in place of the standard GNU coreutils. uutils is intended to be fully GNU-compatible, but reimplements the entire suite of OS components in Rust, providing better memory safety and (hopefully!) more robust code where the OS needs it most. As with any major change, this is not entirely without risk, and it is possible that users could see core system tools behave differently than they used to. If you notice a core system utility break or behave differently than expected, please file a bug report against rust-coreutils.

Note that findutils and diffutils have NOT been replaced with their Rust equivalents from uutils yet. find, xargs, and diff are still the original GNU versions, written in C.

sudo-rs

Along with coreutils, another important package that has been replaced with a Rust rewrite is sudo. Unlike uutils’ rust-coreutils however, sudo-rs is NOT fully drop-in compatible with the original sudo, and omits some features the developers have deemed to be “largely unused” or “only available for legacy platforms”. In particular, the -E option for passing through the current environment to the application executed with sudo is ignored by sudo-rs, and thus sudo -E application will oftentimes misbehave. Please be mindful of these changes if you notice sudo or a script or application that depends on it not behaving as expected.

Known Issues

  • When doing an OEM installation of Lubuntu, the system will not be able to enter the first-time user setup wizard unless you run “sudo apt install calamares” in a terminal within the OEM setup environment. Bug link.
  • If your system chooses to use the text-only bootup splash screen rather than the graphical splash screen for some reason, it will erroneously report that you are running Lubuntu 25.04. Bug link.
  • When installing onto a BIOS system with manual partitioning, one must select a non-default bootloader installation location on the manual partitioning screen, then re-select the default bootloader installation location. Failure to do so will result in an unbootable system. Bug link.

Common Release Notes

Please also check the Ubuntu Release Notes for more common issues and bugs affecting all Ubuntu flavors.

Technical Notes

Despite our original plans laid out in the 25.04 release announcement, Lubuntu 25.10 has ended up being a semi-boring release. We had substantially less development manpower than we’ve had for previous releases, thus our primary focus has been keeping Lubuntu working as well as it has worked historically, rather than innovating new features. As such, Lubuntu 25.10 continues to use the X11 display server, provides mostly the same set of apps as previous releases, uses the same theming, etc.

Some our our plans related to Wayland have changed as a result of this lessened manpower. Despite having prepared to switch to the Miriway compositor early on in Questing Quokka’s development, we do not have developers with sufficient amounts of free time to continue driving this initiative. Our current plans are to switch from X11 to labwc by default in 26.04, as labwc is a stable, well-established, Openbox-like Wayland compositor that we have experience with. We would love to use Miriway instead, but it simply isn’t feasible unless developers with sufficient experience and time are willing to help us make it happen.

We need help with development. Lubuntu is effectively in “maintenance mode” at this point, but we’d like to get back to developing full-speed. If you have spare time and wanted to get into open source development, please introduce yourself, we need you! The most vital areas we need help with are continuous testing of all of the features our installer offers, and fixing bugs discovered during that testing. Our developers are generally low on time, but can oftentimes give pointers to help with whatever you want to work on. The installer is stable for simple installation scenarios, but oftentimes issues can be dug up by playing with edge cases such as manual partitioning, OEM installation, and the like. If you’re already reasonably seasoned as Debian packaging, we would also greatly appreciate help there!

What is Lubuntu?

Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock-solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu provides a simple but modern and powerful graphical user interface, and comes with a wide variety of applications so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive. You can find the following major applications and toolkits installed by default in this release:

You can find a variety of other applications installed which aim to enhance your experience while staying out of the way of your normal workflow. New features and bugfixes in core Ubuntu components can be found here.

Lubuntu Manual

The Lubuntu Team has been hard at work in polishing the Lubuntu Manual to make it easy for new and experienced users alike to use their system more productively. The manual can be found at manual.lubuntu.me. We want to thank Lyn Perrine for all the hard work she has put into the Lubuntu Manual. Thank you!

Versions of the Lubuntu Manual:

While the documentation for previous releases will be kept in the Git repository, they will not be published anywhere.

Want an easy way to access the manual? Just double-click the “Lubuntu Manual” icon on the desktop.

Lubuntu Project

How can I help?

We can always use more help! No matter your skill level or your technical experience, there’s something you can help with that can make a huge difference in Lubuntu. Join us on our Matrix chat and talk to us there. Whether you know another language, have some spare time to help us test Lubuntu, are good at writing documentation, or just want to stay “in the know,” that is the place to be. More information about contributing can be found here. If you want to contribute to Lubuntu but do not feel you have the time or skills, consider buying a t-shirt or donating to Lubuntu. Another great method to get involved is bug reporting. If you notice an issue, please file a bug using the instructions on the Lubuntu Wiki. Don’t want to file a bug? Let us know what the problem is (in detail, enough that we can reproduce it) and we can assist you in filing one or do it ourselves.

Contributors

We would like to thank the following contributors for dedicating their time to Lubuntu this cycle. Thank you!

We’d also like to thank previous (and hopefully future!) contributors to the Lubuntu project. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you!

We also wanted to give a special mention to Julien Lavergne, our Project Lead Emeritus and Founder. Without you, the Lubuntu project would not exist. Thank you.

Global Team

The Lubuntu Global Team has been created to foster communities in non-English languages and locales. An up-to-date list of our communities can be found on our Links page, but the existing groups include: Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Arabic, and French. If you would like to start a language group, join our development channel and talk with the Global Team. At minimum, you should have a few interested drivers of the community, and at least one administrator that speaks English.

18 Sep

Lubuntu Questing Beta Released!

Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 25.10 Beta has been released. With the codename Questing Quokka, Lubuntu 25.10 will be the 29th release of Lubuntu, the fifteenth release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

Support lifespan

With 25.10 being an interim release, it will follow the standard non-LTS support period of nine months, which means 25.10 will be supported until July 2026. Please note that 25.10 is still in Beta, and is not officially supported until its scheduled release on October 9, 2025.

You can download 25.10 Beta here. If you would like to upgrade your existing 24.04 LTS or 25.04 installation, please visit our manual page describing the process. Common Ubuntu instructions can be found here.

Known Issues and Notable Changes

LXQt

LXQt 2.2 is now shipped by default. More information on its release can be found here: 2.2.0

rust-coreutils

Starting in Ubuntu 25.10, Ubuntu now uses the uutils Rust implementation of coreutils in place of the standard GNU coreutils. uutils is intended to be fully GNU-compatible, but reimplements the entire suite of OS components in Rust, providing better memory safety and (hopefully!) more robust code where the OS needs it most. As with any major change, this is not entirely without risk, and it is possible that users could see core system tools behave differently than they used to. If you notice a core system utility break or behave differently than expected, please file a bug report against rust-coreutils.

Note that findutils and diffutils have NOT been replaced with their Rust equivalents from uutils yet. find, xargs, and diff are still the original GNU versions, written in C.

sudo-rs

Along with coreutils, another important package that has been replaced with a Rust rewrite is sudo. Unlike uutils’ rust-coreutils however, sudo-rs is NOT fully drop-in compatible with the original sudo, and omits some features the developers have deemed to be “largely unused” or “only available for legacy platforms”. In particular, the -E option for passing through the current environment to the application executed with sudo is ignored by sudo-rs, and thus sudo -E application will oftentimes misbehave. Please be mindful of these changes if you notice sudo or a script or application that depends on it not behaving as expected.

Known issues

  • apt sometimes has odd behavior when resolving packages, choosing packages that one wouldn’t expect if presented with multiple choices that can satisfy a dependency. This has not been filed as a bug in Ubuntu, but has been filed as a bug in Debian. See the bug report here. Consider double-checking the list of packages that will be installed when installing new software. This behavior has resulted in two bugs in Lubuntu:
    • KWallet and KWalletManager are being installed by default instead of gnome-keyring: Bug link
    • Alacritty is being installed alongside QTerminal: Bug link
  • Some disk management packages (cryptsetup and btrfs-tools, possibly others) are no longer being preinstalled, causing KDE Partition Manager to complain in some instances.
  • Installing with manual partitioning on BIOS systems may result in an unbootable system. To prevent this, after setting up your desired partition layout, change the bootloader installation location to something other than its default value, then change it back. This will get Calamares to remember what disk it should install the bootloader to.
  • On OEM installations of Lubuntu, double-clicking the “Finish OEM preparation” icon will do nothing. This is because kdialog is not being pre-installed on accident. You may be able to work around this by running sudo apt install kdialog in the OEM session before double-clicking the icon.

Common Release Notes

Please also check the Ubuntu Release Notes for more common issues and bugs affecting all Ubuntu flavors.

What is Lubuntu?

Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock-solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu provides a simple but modern and powerful graphical user interface, and comes with a wide variety of applications so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive. You can find the following major applications and toolkits installed by default in this release:

You can find a variety of other applications installed which aim to enhance your experience while staying out of the way of your normal workflow. New features and bugfixes in core Ubuntu components can be found here.

Lubuntu Manual

The Lubuntu Team has been hard at work in polishing the Lubuntu Manual to make it easy for new and experienced users alike to use their system more productively. The manual can be found at manual.lubuntu.me. We want to thank Lyn Perrine for all the hard work she has put into the Lubuntu Manual. Thank you!

Versions of the Lubuntu Manual:

While the documentation for previous releases will be kept in the Git repository, they will not be published anywhere.

Want an easy way to access the manual? Just double-click the “Lubuntu Manual” icon on the desktop.

Lubuntu Project

How can I help?

We can always use more help! No matter your skill level or your technical experience, there’s something you can help with that can make a huge difference in Lubuntu. Join us on our Matrix chat and talk to us there. Whether you know another language, have some spare time to help us test Lubuntu, are good at writing documentation, or just want to stay “in the know,” that is the place to be. More information about contributing can be found here. If you want to contribute to Lubuntu but do not feel you have the time or skills, consider buying a t-shirt or donating to Lubuntu. Another great method to get involved is bug reporting. If you notice an issue, please file a bug using the instructions on the Lubuntu Wiki. Don’t want to file a bug? Let us know what the problem is (in detail, enough that we can reproduce it) and we can assist you in filing one or do it ourselves.

Contributors

We would like to thank the following contributors for dedicating their time to Lubuntu this cycle. Thank you!

We’d also like to thank previous (and hopefully future!) contributors to the Lubuntu project. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you!

We also wanted to give a special mention to Julien Lavergne, our Project Lead Emeritus and Founder. Without you, the Lubuntu project would not exist. Thank you.

Global Team

The Lubuntu Global Team has been created to foster communities in non-English languages and locales. An up-to-date list of our communities can be found on our Links page, but the existing groups include: Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Arabic, and French. If you would like to start a language group, join our development channel and talk with the Global Team. At minimum, you should have a few interested drivers of the community, and at least one administrator that speaks English.

10 Oct

Lubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole) Released!

Wake up and hear the birds sing! Thanks to the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 24.10 has been released. With the codename Oracular Oriole, Lubuntu 24.10 is the 27th release of Lubuntu, the 13th release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

Download and Support Lifespan

With Lubuntu 24.10 being an interim release, it will follow the standard non-LTS support period of nine months; this means that Lubuntu 24.10 will be supported until July 2025. Our development focus going forward will be on Lubuntu 25.04 and future releases, so only critical bugfixes and security updates will be provided.
If you choose to use Lubuntu 24.10, we STRONGLY recommend upgrading to 25.04 soon after it is released, but before Lubuntu 24.10 hits end of life. The Lubuntu Update application will assist you in upgrading your system when it becomes necessary.

Installation

You can download Lubuntu 24.10 here. If you would like to upgrade your existing 24.04 installation, please visit our manual page describing the process. Common Ubuntu instructions can be found here.

New in Lubuntu 24.10

LXQt 2.0 and Qt 6

Lubuntu 24.10 is the first release of Lubuntu to ship with a primarily Qt 6-based environment. Previous LXQt releases used Qt 5. Due to this upgrade, modern Qt 6-based apps such as the latest versions of VirtualBox, qBitTorrent, and more will now be themed similar to the rest of the desktop. Qt 5 app theming also still works, allowing you to continue to use apps that haven’t caught up with Qt 6 yet.
Lubuntu-specific applications (namely Lubuntu Update and the Lubuntu Installer Prompt) have also been updated to use Qt 6. The Calamares installer continues to use Qt 5 however. We expect to switch Calamares to using Qt 6 for Lubuntu 25.04

Kvantum Theming

For a while now, Lubuntu has been using the Breeze theme from KDE Plasma. While this has worked well enough for a while, it has had some incompatibilities with LXQt crop up before, and this cycle it happened again. Rather than continuing to make a KDE component work where it wasn’t really designed to, Lubuntu 24.10 now ships with Kvantum theming. Kvantum’s lead developer is also one of the primary developers of LXQt, so we expect no major incompatibilities going forward.
Our new theme, aptly named “Lubuntu”, is based upon Kvantum’s KvArc theme and is modified to look more similar to Lubuntu’s prior theming.

What happened to Wayland?

Readers who have kept up with our blog probably remember that we wanted to offer Wayland as an option in 24.04 and switch over to using Wayland by default in 24.10. Sadly this did not go according to plan. LXQt 1.4 and LXQt 2.0 both turned out to be too painful to use in a Wayland environment for us to be comfortable shipping Wayland by default, and we did not have time to implement them as an option. LXQt 2.1 is expected to ship with full Wayland support, so we will be trying to make Wayland happen for Lubuntu 25.04.

Artwork

Lubuntu 24.10 ships with a stunning new wallpaper and login screen. A special thank you to our Lubuntu art team for this lovely creation.

Common Release Notes

Please also check the Ubuntu Oracular Oriole [24.10] Release Notes for more common issues and bugs affecting all Ubuntu flavors.

What is Lubuntu?

Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock-solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu provides a simple but modern and powerful graphical user interface, and comes with a wide variety of applications so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive. You can find the following major applications and toolkits installed by default in this release:
  • LXQt 2.0.0
  • Qt 6.6.2
  • Mozilla Firefox as shipped in the snap package, the version present on the ISO is version 130.0
  • LibreOffice 24.8.1.2
  • VLC 3.0.21
  • Featherpad 1.5.1
  • Discover Software Center 6.1.5
You can find a variety of other applications installed which aim to enhance your experience while staying out of the way of your normal workflow. New features and bugfixes in core Ubuntu components can be found here.

Lubuntu Manual

The Lubuntu Team has been hard at work in polishing the Lubuntu Manual to make it easy for new and experienced users alike to use their system more productively. The manual can be found at manual.lubuntu.me. We want to thank Lyn Perrine for all the hard work she has put into the Lubuntu Manual. Thank you! Versions of the Lubuntu Manual:
Need help quickly? The Lubuntu Manual can be accessed via the “Lubuntu Manual” desktop icon.

Lubuntu Project

How can I help?

We can always use more help! No matter your skill level or your technical experience, there’s something you can help with that can make a huge difference in Lubuntu. Join us on our IRC, Matrix, or Telegram chats and talk to us there. Whether you know another language, have some spare time to help us test Lubuntu, are good at writing documentation, or just want to stay “in the know,” that is the place to be. More information about contributing can be found here. If you want to contribute to Lubuntu but do not feel you have the time or skills, consider buying a t-shirt or donating to Lubuntu. Another great method to get involved is bug reporting. If you notice an issue, please file a bug using the instructions on the Lubuntu Wiki. Don’t want to file a bug? Let us know what the problem is (in detail, enough that we can reproduce it) and we can assist you in filing one or do it ourselves.

Contributors

We would like to thank the following contributors for dedicating their time to Lubuntu this cycle. Thank you!
We would also like to thank the following past members for their dedication to the project. Without you, Lubuntu would not be what it is today. Thank you!

Global Team

The Lubuntu Global Team has been created to foster communities in non-English languages and locales. An up-to-date list of our communities can be found on our Links page, but the existing groups include: Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Arabic, and French. If you would like to start a language group, join our development channel and talk with the Global Team. At minimum, you should have a few interested drivers of the community, and at least one administrator that speaks English. We now have multiple languages available in the support section of our Discourse forum.
22 Feb

Lubuntu 22.04.4 LTS is Released!

Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 22.04.4 LTS has been released. With the codename Jammy Jellyfish, Lubuntu 22.04 is the 22nd release of Lubuntu, the eighth release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

Support lifespan

Lubuntu 22.04 LTS will be supported for 3 years until April 2025. Our main focus will be on this and future releases.

What’s The Difference Between Lubuntu 22.04 LTS And This Release?

Lubuntu 22.04.4 is a set of images produced for convenience so that a fresh install of the latest Lubuntu LTS does not require as many updates after install. If you do system updates regularly, you are already running Lubuntu 22.04.4 LTS, and if you install Lubuntu on a system using a Lubuntu 22.04 LTS image and do system updates, that system will also then be running Lubuntu 22.04.4 LTS.

This Lubuntu 22.04.4 media also contains the updated HWE 6.5 kernel stack (from Lubuntu 23.10). This enables newer hardware to function more smoothly. Prior 22.04 22.04 media contained only the 5.15 GA kernel stack or now-outdated HWE kernel stacks.

What is Lubuntu?

Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the LXQt desktop environment. The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock-solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu provides a simple, modern and powerful graphical user interface, and comes with a wide variety of applications so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive.

You can find the following major applications and toolkits installed by default in this release:

  • LXQt 0.17.0 – more information here.
  • Qt 5.15.3
  • Mozilla Firefox will be shipped as a Snap package with version 122 and will receive updates throughout the support cycle of the release.
  • The LibreOffice 7.3.7 suite.
  • VLC 3.0.16, for viewing media and listening to music.
  • Featherpad 1.0.1, for notes and code editing.
  • Discover Software Center 5.24.7, for an easy, graphical way to install and update software.

You can find a variety of other applications installed which aim to enhance your experience while staying out of the way of your normal workflow.

Please note: The change of firefox to snap package, results in the browser being slower to start. It does not impact execution or subsequent runs during that session. The reason for this is because setting up the confined environment in which snaps run takes time. This is noticeable on first run especially with live media having improved significantly when compared to prior Lubuntu 22.04 LTS media. The confined environment provides significant security and privacy benefits.

If you’d like to use LXQt 1.4 on your existing, or new Lubuntu 22.04.4 LTS install, then please see how to upgrade it with the use of the Lubuntu Backports PPA.

Upgrading Lubuntu to 22.04 LTS

Notice about upgrading from Lubuntu 20.04 LTS with LXQt

If you are upgrading from Lubuntu 20.04 LTS that has LXQt, this new version uses a different Openbox settings configuration file. If you have customized ~/.config/openbox/lxqt-rc.xml you will want to copy that file to ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml. New installations are not impacted by this change.

New installs of Lubuntu 22.04 LTS no longer include the programs trojita, fcitx and k3b, which will cause those applications to be removed from your existing system on upgrade, unless you mark them as manually installed using the procedure we’ve documented here. You should do this for each of the programs you use, before you perform the upgrade.

For more information about upgrading please visit our manual page that describes the process. In addition, more information about upgrading releases in Ubuntu and all the flavors for the 22.04 release, can be found here.

Where can I download it?

You can download Lubuntu 22.04.4 LTS on our downloads page.

Installer

Lubuntu uses the Calamares system installer in place of the Ubiquity installer that most other flavors use. 22.04 ships with Calamares 3.2.61. For a full/erase disk install, we have added the option of a swapfile by default. The swapfile size is initially set to 512 MB. The option for no swap is still available as a dropdown selection.

For a full description of the new features and fixes, see the upstream announcements for 3.2.61.

Lubuntu Manual

The Lubuntu Team has been hard at work in polishing the Lubuntu Manual to make it easy for new and experienced users alike to use their system more productively. The book can be found at manual.lubuntu.me.

We want to thank Lyn Perrine for all the hard work she has put into the Lubuntu Manual. Thank you!

All existing URLs now redirect to https://manual.lubuntu.me/stable/. Going forward, the tip of the master branch (WIP documentation for the next release) can be found at https://manual.lubuntu.me/master/, and documentation for Lubuntu 22.04 LTS can be found at https://manual.lubuntu.me/lts/. While the documentation for previous releases will be kept in the Git repository, they will not be published anywhere.

Lubuntu Project

How can I help?

We can always use more help! No matter your skill level or your technical experience, there’s something you can help with that can make a huge difference in Lubuntu. Join us on any of our chat platforms (preferably Matrix) and talk to us there. Whether you know another language, have some spare time to help us test Lubuntu, are good at writing documentation, or just want to stay “in the know,” that is the place to be. More information about contributing can be found here.

If you want to contribute to Lubuntu but do not feel you have the time or skills, consider buying a t-shirt or donating to Lubuntu.

Another great method to get involved is bug reporting. If you notice an issue, please file a bug using the instructions on the Lubuntu Wiki.

Don’t want to file a bug? Let us know what the problem is (in detail, enough that we can reproduce it) and we can assist you in filing one or do it ourselves.

Contributors

We would like to thank the following contributors for dedicating their time to Lubuntu this cycle. Thank you!

In addition, we would also like to recognize some very active contributors on our Discourse forum.

Thank you for contributing to the Lubuntu community!

Global Team

The Lubuntu Global Team has been created to foster communities in non-English languages and locales, and includes Hans Möller, Noumeno, and Jyoti Gomes as the initial drivers of the project. An up-to-date list can be found on our Links page, but the existing groups include: Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Arabic, and French. If you would like to start a language group, join our development channel and talk with the Global Team. At minimum, you should have a few interested drivers of the community, and at least one administrator that speaks English.

We now have multiple languages available in the support section of our Discourse forum.

Resolved Bugs

The original Lubuntu 22.04 LTS media when used to install with a btrfs file-system usually resulted in an unbootable system due to this bug. This did not affect upgraded systems, impacting only new installs using BTRFS file-systems and 22.04 media; this issue will not impact new installs of Lubuntu 22.04.4 LTS.

The lubuntu-update-notifier did not prompt users when configuration files conflicted with installed versions. In addition, if lubuntu-update-notifier was interrupted during an upgrade there was no mechanism to handle that. Further information can be found on our Discourse post.

Libreoffice online help was previously not usable due to a confinement issue with the firefox snap, snapd, and this issue. This has now been resolved.

Known Bugs

Please check the Ubuntu Release Notes for more common issues and bugs affecting all Ubuntu flavors.

25 Jan

Lubuntu 23.04 Reaches End-of-Life – Upgrade to 23.10 Now

Lubuntu 23.04 has reached end-of-life as of today, January 25, 2024. It will no longer receive software updates (including security fixes) or technical support. All users are urged to upgrade to Lubuntu 23.10 as soon as possible to stay secure. You can upgrade to Lubuntu 23.10 without reinstalling Lubuntu from scratch by following the official upgrade procedure. Alternatively, you can download Lubuntu 23.10 or Lubuntu 22.04 and do a clean installation if you prefer.

Nine months ago, on April 20th, 2023, Lubuntu 23.04 was released. It shipped a number of new features including an enabled-by-default X compositor (Picom), PipeWire, a new default screensaver, and the latest (at the time) version of LXQt. While the innovation and stability Lubuntu 23.04 provided served us well, it is now time to move on. We are now focusing our support efforts on Lubuntu 23.10 and later, as well as on Lubuntu 22.04 LTS. Lubuntu 23.04 will no longer receive bug or security fixes from the Lubuntu team. Additionally, as the underlying Ubuntu 23.04 packages Lubuntu uses have reached end-of-life, Lubuntu 23.04 will no longer receive updates for any core applications, utilities, or OS components.

Lubuntu features two different types of releases – Long Term Support (LTS) releases and interim releases. Interim releases are supported for only nine months after release, and are primarily for users who are willing or able to upgrade or reinstall frequently in order to get the best that Lubuntu has to offer. Lubuntu 23.04 was an interim release, and is being dropped from Lubuntu support accordingly.

Note that users of Lubuntu 22.04 LTS do not have to take any action at this time. LTS releases are supported for three years from the date of release. We will continue to support Lubuntu 22.04 LTS until April 2025.

If you are still running Lubuntu 23.04, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to Lubuntu 23.10 as soon as possible. You can read about what’s new in Lubuntu 23.10 here. Alternatively, if you are unable to use Lubuntu 23.10, or if you would like to use our LTS releases and avoid frequent upgrades, you can install Lubuntu 22.04 from scratch and enjoy another year of updates and support before having to upgrade again.

Thank you to everyone who uses Lubuntu! If you have problems reinstalling or upgrading, feel free to ask for help via our official support channels. We’re happy to help users having upgrade problems even after Lubuntu 23.04’s end-of-life date. You can find a list of places to reach us by visiting our Links page. We can also be reached via IRC at #lubuntu on Libera.Chat.