Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 21.04 has been released. With the codename Hirsute Hippo, Lubuntu 21.04 is the 20th release of Lubuntu, the sixth release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

Support lifespan

Lubuntu 21.04 will be supported until January 2022. Our main focus will be on this and future releases.

Lubuntu 20.04 LTS will be supported until April 2023. For 20.04 LTS, we are limiting changes to critical fixes and underlying system changes shipped with all other 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 0.16.0 – with many improvements over 0.15, you can go here for more information.
• LXQt Archiver 0.3.0 which is based on Engrampa, is now included.
• Qt 5.15.2
• Mozilla Firefox 87.0, which will receive updates from the Ubuntu Security Team throughout the support cycle of the release.
• The LibreOffice 7.1.2 suite.
• VLC 3.0.12, for viewing media and listening to music.
• Featherpad 0.17.1, for notes and code editing.
• Discover Software Center 5.21.4, for an easy, graphical way to install and update software.

Our update notifier application received an update. The new update adds the packages and versions to the tree view to see the pending updates better. In addition, Update Notifier now has a separate tree view for security updates. Update Notifier was developed by Lubuntu Member Hans Möller. Update Notifier also lets you update your system from within the application itself.

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.

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Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, we are pleased to announce that Lubuntu 20.04.2 LTS has been released!

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.

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Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, we are pleased to announce that Lubuntu 18.04.4 LTS has been released!

What is Lubuntu?

Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu flavor which uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock solid Ubuntu base. Lubuntu specifically targets older machines with lower resources, but also runs great on newer hardware. Along with a simple but usable graphical user interface, Lubuntu comes with a wide variety of applications chosen for their small footprint so you can browse, email, chat, play, and be productive.

Where can I download it?

You can download Lubuntu 18.04.4 LTS on our downloads page.

This announcement on our official website (Lubuntu.me, NOT Lubuntu dot net, which is not run by Lubuntu contributors) replaces the traditional release notes we have provided in the past on the wiki. We have left out some notes that are common to all flavors, so we recommend that you read the Ubuntu release notes.

What’s The Difference Between Lubuntu 18.04.3 LTS And This Release?

Lubuntu 18.04.4 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 (as Lubuntu continues to release Stable Release Updates and security fixes to make your experience as smooth as possible and to fix any bugs, if you want to help us out with this, see below, we always need more help). If you do system updates regularly, you are already running Lubuntu 18.04.4 LTS, and if you install Lubuntu on a system using a Lubuntu 18.04.3 LTS image or a previous point release and do system updates, that system will also then be running Lubuntu 18.04.4 LTS.

At this time, this will be the last planned 18.04 release for Lubuntu, thus also making it both the last LXDE release as well as the last i386 release.

How do I get support?

You can get support for Lubuntu here.

How do I help?

We always need more help! Feel free to join our development channel (which is bridged three ways to Matrix, Telegram, and IRC) 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.

Known Issues

Bug 186192  If there is less free space on the target drive than the USB install media, the installer may attempt to install to the USB drive while it is being used. Due to this we recommend not utilizing the install alongside option unless there is sufficient free space.

Did we miss something? Please file a bug and tag it with “lubuntu”. You can find out more about filing bugs at our wiki page.

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.

Thanks to our testers!

Huge thanks to Chris Guiver (guiverc), Leó Kolbeinsson (leoK), Bill (franksmcb) from the Mate team, and others for testing this release.

Lubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo) will reach End of Life on Thursday, January 23, 2020. This means that after that date there will be no further security updates or bugfixes released. We highly recommend that you update to 19.10 as soon as possible if you are still running 19.04.

After January 23rd, the only supported releases of Lubuntu will be 18.04, with LXDE, and 19.10, with LXQt. All other releases of Lubuntu will be considered unsupported, and will no longer receive any further updates from the Lubuntu team.

You can find instructions on how to upgrade your Lubuntu installation here at our manual page.

Note, due to the extensive changes required for the shift in desktop environments, the Lubuntu team does not support upgrading from 18.04 or below to any greater release. Doing so will result in a broken system. If you are on 18.04 or below and would like to upgrade, please do a fresh install. The installation image can be obtained from our downloads page.

At 2:15 AM Central US Time, the Lubuntu Team was informed by our hosting provider, Altispeed Technologies, that there had been a problem with the server we use for Lubuntu’s infrastructure, including Phabricator, Weblate, Jenkins, the IRC bridge and other services. This resulted in complete data loss for all of the aforementioned services. Below is a statement from Altispeed Technologies regarding the incident:

In an effort to demonstrate good stewardship of Linux and open source,
Altispeed Technologies donates the server, storage space, and bandwidth for
hosting many of the Lubuntu resources. During a migration effort last night,
the virtual machine that stores production data for the Lubuntu Phabricator
instance (among other services) was inadvertently destroyed. Despite having
backups enabled, our VPS provider was unable to recover the data and it has
been permanently lost.
Our team is working to re-provision the system and we have signed an
agreement with a datacenter to run our services under our control. All
Lubuntu resources hosted by Altispeed will be moved at that time. We
apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and will continue to
work towards giving back to the community.

We still have complete access to the Git repositories hosted on the Phabricator instance, as they have been mirrored to GitHub, however, all of the tasks on our Phabricator instance as well as the wiki and login information for all users has been lost.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and expect services to be back up before the end of the day Central US time. On a positive note, starting anew has allowed us to refine the way the services are organized on the server, to offer a faster and more secure experience going forward.

Lubuntu needs your help testing the Lubuntu 16.04.6 Release Candidates so we can release on Thursday, February 28, 2019.

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Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, we are pleased to announce that Lubuntu 18.04.2 LTS has been released!

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The Lubuntu community has grown exponentially since our switch to LXQt. With new users, contributors, and Lubuntu enthusiasts among many other people who have decided to join our community, we are finding the need to scale the project further than the unwritten technically-led oligarchy that we currently have in the Lubuntu project. Therefore, we are pleased to announce the Lubuntu Council.

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Lubuntu has been and continues to be the go-to Ubuntu flavor for people who want the most from their computers, especially older hardware that cannot handle today’s workloads. However, the project and computing as a whole has drastically changed in many ways since its origin ten years ago. Computers have become faster, more secure, and most notably, have moved off of the traditional 32-bit i686 (generalized as i386 in Debian and Ubuntu) architecture.

As an increasing number of Linux distributions have focused their attention on the 64-bit x86 architecture (amd64) and not on i386, we have found that it is harder to support than it once was. With i386-only machines becoming an artifact of the past, it has become increasingly clear to the Lubuntu Team that we need to evaluate its removal from the architectures we support. After careful consideration, we regret to inform our users that Lubuntu 19.04 and future versions will not see a release for the i386 architecture. Please do note that we will continue to support Lubuntu 18.04 LTS i386 users as a first-class citizen until its End of Life date in April of 2021.

We would like to sincerely thank the contributors to and the users of Lubuntu on i386. Without you, Lubuntu would not be what it is today. The Lubuntu Team would like encourage you to read our post regarding taking a new direction if you would like to understand more about our future aspirations as a project. Lubuntu is far from slowing down; if you would like to join our growing team of contributors, check out our Telegram/Matrix/IRC channels.

Adam Conrad always does a great job in stating that people should test the Release Candidates. Here’s what he has said this time:

Over the next few hours, builds will start popping on the Cosmic Final milestone page[1] on the ISO tracker. These builds are not final. We’re still waiting on a few more fixes, a few things to migrate, etc. I’ve intentionally not updated base-files or the ISO labels to reflect the release status (so please don’t file bugs about those).

What there are, however, are “close enough” for people to be testing in anger, filing bugs, fixing bugs, iterating image builds, and testing all over again. So, please, don’t wait until Wednesday night to test, testing just before release is TOO LATE to get anything fixed. Get out there, grab your favourite ISO, beat it up, report bugs, escalate bugs, get things fixed, respin (if you’re a flavour lead with access), and test, test… And test. Did I mention testing? Please[2] test.

Thanks,

… Adam

[1] http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/397/builds
[2] Please.

Please, help us test Lubuntu Release Candidates. You can find the link to the dailies on our downloads page. When you’re done, so we know you tested, please get an Ubuntu SSO account (if you don’t have one already) and report the result on iso.qa.ubuntu.com. This means you, i386 testers. It’s your time to shine!

Have you tested this ISO to your heart’s content and reported your results? Help us with some of the other non-technical tasks which need to be done before the release, including proofreading the new Lubuntu Manual and helping us polish the release announcement.

Also, send us your Lubuntu screenshots before Tuesday (on any one of our social media accounts) to get them in the announcement!