Lubuntu Plucky Puffin Beta Released!
Thanks to the hard work of our contributors, we are happy to announce the release of Lubuntu's Plucky Beta, which will become Lubuntu 25.04. This is a snapshot of the daily images.
Approximately two months ago, we posted an Alpha-level update. While some information is duplicated below, that contains an accurate, concise technical summary of our improvements this cycle, while this post has a much wider scope.
The elephant in the room
For those not closely following the latest developments from Ubuntu's Discourse instance and/or the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, there is an elephant in the room.
Earlier this year, the Open Source community at large mourned the substantial loss of thought leader and technical expert Steve Langasek. This is still a sensitive topic for many people; Steve was not only an excellent and highly influential technical leader, manager, and advisor, he was a friend to many of us. Steve deserves our most sincere gratitude and respect, and our hearts go out to his family and loved ones.
This loss has also presented great logistical challenges for the wider Ubuntu community. Steve was not only a hard-working engineer, he was extremely efficient, and had an excellent eye for inconsistencies. The unrelenting chasm in our processes and everyday efforts presented by this challenge has caused this cycle to be more difficult on us all.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States of America, was in office from 1933 to 1945. Among his many accomplishments, he is credited for being a thought leader during one of the US' most tumultuous and turbulent eras, the Great Depression and WWII. A substantial portion of his speeches contain timeless quotes and values, which we can draw wisdom and inspiration from:
I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 4th, 1933, Inaugural Address
In the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, we have several similar, contemporary reminders which echo a similar sentiment:
The poorest decision of all is no decision: clarity of direction has value in itself. Sometimes all the data are not available, or consensus is elusive. A decision must still be made. There is no guarantee of a perfect decision every time – we prefer to err, learn, and err less in future than to postpone action indefinitely.
A leader’s foremost goal is the success of the team.
Leadership occasionally requires bold decisions that will not be widely understood, consensual or popular. We value the courage to take such decisions, because they enable the project as a whole to move forward faster than we could if we required complete consensus. Nevertheless, boldness demands considerateness; take bold decisions, but do so mindful of the challenges they present for others, and work to soften the impact of those decisions on them. Communicating changes and their reasoning clearly and early on is as important as the implementation of the change itself.
Be bold. Be courageous.
…but, be considerate too, please.
Qt 6.8.3, and delivering an excellent Qt stack
We are deeply committed to ensuring the Qt offering in Ubuntu and Debian is the best it can be. We actively participate in packaging and bugfixing for Qt packaging, and care about the state of Qt in the archives. We have an excellent opportunity this cycle to provide a Qt stack that is more stable than past releases.
The release schedules for Qt 6.8, Qt 6.9, and Qt 6.10 align extremely well with Ubuntu's, and we would like to reiterate our great appreciation for the Qt project, both for your considerateness (whether intentional or not) and your excellent work.
What does this mean for the end user? The desktop environment and vast majority of applications in Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Kylin, and the installer for Ubuntu Unity all use Qt as the primary user interface toolkit. We even collaborate with the Lomiri project to ensure they are kept in the loop.
As tracked in this Launchpad bug, we will be delivering Qt 6.8.3 to users over the course of the next week or less. This effort reinforces our commitment to providing a stable, robust, and reliable Qt 6 stack in Ubuntu.
X/Twitter, and addressing our silence
For those who have not been following world news, someone controversial bought Twitter. Other projects are taking one stance or another, we will not have an opinion on this matter as a project, and that is final. As a general rule, we want to be on all platforms where our users are, regardless of its ownership and rules. You can find a link to our official platforms here.
Historically, we have pushed people towards following @LubuntuOfficial on X because that is where the latest updates have been posted. Recently, we've become locked out of the account entirely.
Our concern with X is not social, it is technical. While we have the password on the Lubuntu Council level, it requires two-factor authentication. The email on the account is valid, but X's mail servers are far too strict, and despite a handful of attempts, refuses to send an email to our account on file.
To put it simply: no, we are not inactive on X because we are taking a stance one way or another. We're simply locked out. If anyone reading this has a contact for the X team so we can get this resolved quickly, please do encourage them to personally DM Simon Quigley on X. We have already exhausted all available public routes and they keep redirecting us and denying us on technicalities due to which specific Lubuntu Member filed the request.
We hope this can be sorted out soon, peacefully.
The installer is noticeably faster
As covered extensively in the Lubuntu Alpha notes linked at the top of this post, we have made significant performance improvements to the speed of Calamares-based installs in Ubuntu, specifically Lubuntu, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu Unity.
Not much has changed between those notes and today, but we have noticed a few rough edges related to the backend rewrite:
- When selecting the Virtual Machine Manager from the Customize menu, it silently fails to install virt-manager. You can work around this by manually installing the
virt-managerpackage at first boot. - We need to re-visit and re-work OEM installs, likely to work with stacked squashfses. We released the Beta without this fix due to the assumption that a very low amount of users will be testing OEM on a non-LTS Beta release.
Both of these issues block the release of Lubuntu 25.04, and are expected to be fixed shortly, likely around the same time Qt 6.8.3 lands.
While this does not apply to us directly, we would also like to compliment the team working on the Ubuntu Desktop Installer, which the other flavors use. This is also noticeably faster this cycle.
You, yes you, join our community!
Are you looking for a better way to be well-connected with the Lubuntu community? Do you want to discuss any common issues with other users, get the latest Lubuntu updates, or learn more about us and our community? The best place to do that is Discourse, anyone is welcome to join or start discussions in that space.
If you are looking for something slightly less formal, yet more current, please consider joining our Discussion channel on Matrix. It is generally a relaxed channel where you can share common ideas about Lubuntu with like-minded users.
As a secondary option, we also semi-regularly browse our subreddit, which has its own great set of content and discussions. In practice, this is mostly support.
If this sounds exciting to you, create a post in the Lubuntu space, or reply to this post on Discourse.
I want to get more involved with testing and reporting bugs, how?
The best way for people to help with testing is by reporting results on the ISO QA tracker. These are extensive tests which cover most aspects we typically check before release.
We would like to take this opportunity to highlight the leaderboard. Assuming every test receives its due diligence, it's a great way to make a noticeable impact in the community, and a fun way to gamify what could ordinarily be arduous.
You can find Lubuntu-specific information on reporting bugs here, or for all of Ubuntu here.
Testers are also encouraged to join us in Lubuntu Development and Ubuntu Flavors on Matrix to collaborate in real time.
Wallpaper
We have a brand new, beautiful wallpaper as the default in Lubuntu Plucky, which you can see on our Discourse version of this post
Special thanks to Aaron Rainbolt for coordinating this.
Thanks!
None of this would have been possible without our passionate team of contributors. Thank you very much to our Lubuntu Members, in no particular order:
- Simon Quigley
- Walter Lapchynski
- Aaron Rainbolt
- Thomas Ward
- Leó Kolbeinsson
- Dan Simmons
- Chris Guiver
- Rober
- Nio Wiklund
- Lyn Perrine
Special thanks to these folks who have assisted in making this Beta release great:
- Utkarsh Gupta and the entire Ubuntu Release Team, especially given the circumstances. Well done.
- Rik Mills
- Erich Eickmeyer
- John Faulk
- Anyone else who feels they should be on this list! We don't forget anyone on purpose.
Extra Credit
- For your weekly source of Ubuntu news, consider subscribing and/or contributing to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter!
- Mir Office Hours – 2025-03-20 16:30UTC
- One Week Until Plucky's Beta
- About the Open Documentation Academy
- Plucky Puffin Feature Freeze Statistics
- Your author is working on a followup for Beta soon after this post is made public. Check back in a few hours and you'll find this note removed, and a link to the new post.
Want to contribute to Ubuntu? Start here.