14 Oct

Lubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) Released!

Thanks to all the hard work from our contributors, Lubuntu 21.10 has been released. With the codename Impish Indri, Lubuntu 21.10 is the 21st release of Lubuntu, the seventh release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

Support lifespan

Lubuntu 21.10 will be supported for 9 months until July 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 0.17.0 – with many improvements over 0.16, you can go here for more information.
LXQt Archiver 0.4.0 which is based on Engrampa, is now included.
Qt 5.15.2
Mozilla Firefox will be shipped as a Debian package with version 93.0 and will receive updates from the Ubuntu Security Team throughout the support cycle of the release.
The LibreOffice 7.2.1 suite.
VLC 3.0.16, for viewing media and listening to music.
Featherpad 0.17.1, for notes and code editing.
Discover Software Center 5.22.5, 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.

Lubuntu 20.10 End of Life and Current Support Statuses

Lubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) was released October 22, 2020 and will reach End of Life on Thursday, July 22, 2021. This means that after that date there will be no further security updates or bugfixes released. We highly recommend that you update to 21.04 as soon as possible if you are still running 20.10.

After July 22nd, the only supported releases of Lubuntu will be 20.04 (until April 2023) and 21.04 (until January 2022). 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.

For more information you can visit our forum post here.

01 Oct

Lubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) BETA testing

We are pleased to announce that the beta images for Lubuntu 20.10 have been released!

While we have reached the bugfix-only stage of our development cycle, these images are not meant to be used in a production system. We highly recommend joining our development group or our forum to let us know about any issues.

Getting the download

You can download the Groovy Gorilla daily build here.

Recording the results

To record your testing, you’ll need a Launchpad/Ubuntu One login. Go here to create one if you haven’t already got one.

Take a look at the testsuites, though most of our testcases can be found here.

Our current behavior when we run a QA-test install is to use the “Install using Calamares (entire disk)” testcase, where in the Comments section we use the first line to briefly list hardware used, the second line has an entry like

Lenovo V14 IIL,Intel Core i3-1005G1,8GB,256GB SSD
Testcase:BIOS,no encryption,full disk,Internet

which highlights it was a BIOS install, no encyption, full disk with internet connected; all of which matches an testcase found on our checklist.

How you describe your hardware is up to you, I get details from sudo lshw roughly in format “Make model (cpu, ram, gpu)” so my x201 will show as
lenovo thinkpad x201 (i5-m520, 4gb, i915)
but in my testcase example I’ve copied the first two lines from a real QA-test install performed by our most recent Lubuntu member Leó Kolbeinsson.

Reporting bugs

Follow the directions in the testsuite. If it does all of those things, great! If it doesn’t, we do need your help. Please file a bug on your testing box, and record the bug ID in the Bug (or Critical Bug) section in the iso.qa.ubuntu.com page when complete.

Follow the directions in the bug report, and be as specific as you can. This is a key step – an unreported bug will be an unfixed bug. For details on reporting bugs please refer to our wiki page and don’t forget to include the bug report number in the iso.qa.ubuntu.com test report.

Questions?

If you have any questions, appropriate places to ask are of course, our discourse site or for faster responses please ask on IRC #lubuntu-devel or via our telegram channel

Please note tests that complete okay with only minor issues should still be PASSED, but the bug ID reported in the “Bugs” section. If you consider it a show-stopper bug, record it in the “Critical bugs” section (failing the test if you believe absolutely necessary).

Thanks!

Thanks in advance to those of you who can help, and please reply on discourse with any issues, concerns, or questions!