Lubuntu Plucky Puffin Alpha Notes
Lubuntu Plucky Puffin is the current development branch of Lubuntu, which will become 25.04. Since the release of 24.10, we have been hard at work polishing the experience and fixing bugs in the upcoming release.
Below, we detail some of the changes you can look forward to in 25.04.
Two Minute Minimal Install
When installing Lubuntu, you may notice that three options are present on the Customize screen: Full, Normal, and Minimal. These allow for different applications to be installed based on the user’s needs. While these options have not changed, the backend has.
Traditionally, in a very basic sense, Lubuntu installations are done by mounting a squashfs file, then using rsync to copy it onto a partition. In layman’s terms, a Lubuntu installation USB drive is simply a wrapper around a zip file, which is then installed onto your hard drive.
When selecting the Minimal option, the squashfs is copied onto the filesystem, but many packages are removed afterwards via a long apt remove or apt purge command. This proves to be inefficient, making minimal installations take longer than normal installations. Instead, in coordination with the Ubuntu Foundations Team, we now have stacked squashfses.
This means that we can limit our installations only to the layer we need. Here is a visual representation of this:
In minimal installations, instead of installing the Standard layer and removing a list of packages, we now only have to install the Minimal layer. In our preliminary testing, the fastest installation time was approximately 90 seconds on real hardware, and the slowest time was approximately three minutes within a virtual machine. Therefore, two minutes is an estimation, not a guarantee. If someone would like to conduct a wider study, we welcome it.
Faster Snap Installation
While the Minimal option does not include snapd, in 24.04, we added support for installing snaps during system installation in the Full or Normal modes. This required some glue to ensure the installation of snaps is both standards-compliant and robust.
To understand the progress we made in this area, let’s first lay out how it currently works on 24.04 and 24.10.
Let’s say the ISO (more precisely, the Standard layer) represents the snaps on the left, and the right represents the latest revisions in the Snap Store:
Each target snap (hello, foo, bar, and baz) is fully downloaded from the Snap Store. Meaning, the download size is approximately 171 MB. Additionally, during the download itself, there is little indication of progress.
The Snap Store does support delta downloads for a given snap. This means, if snap foo with revision 100 has a full download size of 100 MB, and we need to update to foo revision 105 which has a full download size of 105 MB, we can instead download the difference between those two snap revisions. The size of the delta can vary, and in this case, will not always be 5 MB.
This means the downloads turn into something like this:
It results in a download of 69 MB instead of 171 MB, which saves network bandwidth, storage bandwidth, and storage space.
Additionally, all pre-installed snaps are updated using delta downloads. The update process is typically done after first boot; previously, the live ISO could be running the latest snap revisions while the freshly installed instance would still have the snap revisions as shipped on the live ISO. This has changed in Plucky.
Qt 6 Everywhere
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.
That being said, it is time to deprecate Qt 5. We are actively working to port as many applications as possible to Qt 6, in time for the ambitious goal of removing Qt 5 entirely before the release of 26.04 LTS. You will notice this general trend across Lubuntu packages.
We would appreciate it if VLC could release a 4.0 beta (or final release, ideally) before the 26.04 LTS feature freeze. This would certainly expedite the process of porting the archive to Qt 6. We are participating in active investigations regarding other popular Qt 5 applications and whether they have a port in progress.
We are also deeply grateful that the Qt 6 release cycles seem to align with the Ubuntu release cycles, as seen in the release schedules for Qt 6.8 and Qt 6.9. We appreciate Qt upstream and their consistency.
Therefore, Ubuntu Plucky is expected to ship with Qt 6.8.3. At the time of writing, we are currently in the process of transitioning from 6.8.1 to 6.8.2. We expect Ubuntu Q (what will become 25.10) to ship with the Qt 6.9 series, and Debian Trixie will (tentatively) release with Qt 6.8.2.
Moving to Dracut
Lubuntu is currently the only flavor which has moved from initramfs-tools to Dracut by default on fresh installs (not the live ISO). We are actively participating in the call to try out Dracut, and would encourage you to report your findings there.
EDIT: Soon after these notes were published, the draft specification was formalized. If you run into any issues, let us know on Matrix or by filing a bug against Dracut in Ubuntu.
We have also sent code to Calamares for more enhanced Dracut support here.
It is entirely possible this change will be reverted prior to the release of 26.04 LTS, if it proves to not be the right fit. Please let us know if you identify any showstoppers.
Where’d Wayland Go?
We originally targeted a full move to Wayland for the 24.10 release (and previously, before the 20.10 release). Both of these attempts were slightly too ambitious, this time for different reasons.
This time is purely technical; we need a new version of Mir in Debian (ideally before Trixie freezes), which will allow us to upload Miriway and switch Lubuntu sessions over.
We are also actively interested in upstream work which will enable Miriway to work well under LXQt. Once the aforementioned issues are solved, getting this merged will be the next step.
Don’t worry, we’re still committed to moving and testing it extensively prior to the release of 26.04 LTS.
What about LXQt?
Lubuntu Plucky currently has LXQt 2.1 with the latest point releases at the time of writing. We will continue to track LXQt upstream releases until Feature Freeze, then cherry-pick bugfixes or include bugfix point releases up until Plucky’s final release as appropriate.
It is entirely possible that we will provide backports for 24.10. Backports to 24.04 may take additional time, depending on Wayland progress.
Into the Matrix
Lubuntu is now fully on Matrix. See our links page to join us.
Additionally, Ubuntu Development discussion has now moved to Matrix. We also have the Ubuntu Qt channel for Qt transition status, development conversation, and more, and the Ubuntu Flavors channel for general discussion and chatter around flavors and cross-flavor communication.
Discourse Transition
We love our Discourse instance, but not maintaining it. We would have jumped ship to the Ubuntu Discourse long ago. Canonical has full time sysadmins, so we don’t need to be. But we kept serving up our own, even when uptime dropped, because support requests were not allowed. That policy has since been revoked, so we’ve carved out a space in the Support & Help category, as well as in the Flavors category.
Our new home will be much like the old one. You should see the same great faces helping out in much the same way. I’m sure there will be some new ones. The organization will be a bit different, but that should improve soon with planned changes.
More to come
These are simply our alpha notes, more to come! Join us on Matrix if you’d like to learn more, or help out.
