Tag Archives: plucky

17 Apr

Lubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) Released!

The Lubuntu Team is proud to announce Lubuntu 25.04, codenamed Plucky Puffin. Lubuntu 25.04 is the 28th release of Lubuntu, the 14th release of Lubuntu with LXQt as the default desktop environment.

With 25.04 being an interim release, it will be supported until January of 2026. If you're a 24.10 user, please upgrade to 25.04 as soon as possible. You can download Lubuntu on our only official downloads page here (which links to the verified cdimage.ubuntu.com).

Our focus this release can be put quite simply: stabilize, refine, and refresh.

How can we stabilize Lubuntu further, so everything is polished by the time 26.04 LTS rolls out?
How can we refine some of our existing code and processes to be more efficient?
How can we refresh Lubuntu to ensure it stays current yet extremely lightweight?

Stabilize

Our primary focus of stabilization this cycle revolved around a few specific points:

The first point that came up is: Qt. Qt is the core engine powering the vast majority of Lubuntu's user interface. We had an opportunity to make our Qt stack even more stable this cycle, and we took it. This work also benefits anything using Qt in Ubuntu, which includes Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and more.

In past releases, we have simply stopped at a .2 patch version; meaning, e.g. 6.8.2. This cycle, we decided to ship .3.

What does this mean? It suggests there will be additional stability. Especially in Kubuntu, Qt issues can turn into (what seems like) Plasma issues. This was important for us all to deliver.

Additionally, we took some time to stabilize some of our existing software and take some notes for next cycle.

Refine

Much of the refinement effort this cycle has went into our custom modules for Calamares, the installer used by Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Unity. We have specific modules catering to our Customize menu, which looks like this in 24.10:

Unfortunately, due to a variety of unique circumstances, we were unable to release 25.04 with many of these refinements related to the Full Install option. We needed to err on the side of stability (there's a reason that comes before refinement), and we continue to have full confidence in our Release Management team. We did what was best for users, and that resulted in functionality inconsistent with 24.10:

Our remedy to this is going to be fairly simple: over the coming weeks, we will be thoroughly testing a fix for this issue, in a way that absolutely works for all testcases, no exceptions, to the same standards we would use to release. At this point, at the discretion of the Lubuntu, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu Unity Release Management teams, respectively, we may release a respin, or 25.04.1. If we do not respin, the fix will be available in a PPA. This information is still unclear, but what is clear, is that we intentionally value stability over refinement, especially this cycle.

If you would like more technical details on what we were hoping to deliver, please see our Alpha notes. Aside from general improvements in robustness, those changes still stand.

We have also been working on refining our processes elsewhere. Instead of putting this in the main release notes, we opted to put it in the Beta notes instead. This being said, we would like to emphasize our most sincere appreciation and respect for all of the work Steve Langasek accomplished over the years, and his love and care for the open source community as a whole.

This, and a few other social elements, have resulted in a handful of social and logistical changes. The Lubuntu Council will be going up for election today, and that announcement will explain more about our plans as an organization for the next year, and the elements we are looking to consider. The best place to stay up-to-date is via our Discourse category, or our regular social media channels.

As a final note on this topic, if you'd like to help us refine Lubuntu, we would absolutely appreciate the effort. In Lubuntu, we welcome considerate individuals, no matter your background. No matter if you are 13 years old or 82, just a user or someone with great technical chops, it is a priority for Lubuntu to foster a welcoming community for everyone.

You may have thought to yourself, "that sounds great, but I'm not sure if I have the time. I'm just a casual user, and I want to stay up to date on the latest, but I'm not sure I can dedicate time to contribute." We've left the light on for you, too. You can still make a meaningful contribution-set and find a path to Lubuntu Membership just by answering support questions, or participating in e.g. Lubuntu's Global group. We would deeply encourage Lubuntu enthusiasts to actively engage in the community.

We're actively looking to expand our member base even further, so even if it's something you're only half-interested in, please, join our Matrix channels, and jump into Discourse. You are welcome, and your contributions to our community are greatly appreciated. This also goes for some of the moderators doing unseen work, including Ubuntu Discourse moderators, r/Lubuntu moderators, and mailing list administrators; we deeply thank you for your work, and understand how tough it can get sometimes.

Refresh

Our biggest point of refresh has been on two fronts, which we've previously laid out in our "24.04 LTS to 26.04 LTS" cycle plans:

  1. Port as much software as reasonable from Qt 5 to Qt 6.
  2. Get Lubuntu fully prepared for Wayland.

Of course, some other items have happened, such as our move to Fancy Menu by default:

This being said, Qt 6 porting and Wayland preparation were the primary points of focus.

Again on the point of "stability comes first," we decided to delay Wayland one last cycle. This is the last time we are delaying this.

Thanks to the warm welcome and support from the Mir team, Fedora LXQt, and a handful of other teams, we are proud to announce that Lubuntu 25.10, Questing Quokka, will indeed ship with Miriway as the default Wayland compositor, backed by a deb-based Mir 2.20. This switch will happen immediately following the opening of Questing, despite the fact that early, pre-alpha daily images may be completely unusable.

We are committed to shipping a fully-Wayland stack as default for Lubuntu 26.04 LTS, and continue to make it a priority to iron out any of the remaining issues. This being said, we would appreciate the support from upstream LXQt in ensuring any existing Mir(iway) compatibility patches are merged, and any new patches we provide in the coming months are promptly merged. We have a member of our team who is also a member of upstream LXQt, and would be more than happy to provide additional support and review hands to finally resolve this point of friction.

We remain optimistic. When we were not doing Wayland prep, we were hard at work porting most of our remaining applications to Qt 6. The vast majority of the applications in Lubuntu now use Qt 6, with one notable, glaring exception being VLC. This will be the final blocker from fully removing Qt 5 from the archive, and we would implore the VLC team in the strongest possible terms to prioritize finally providing 4.0 in the next six months. We do not want to switch off of VLC; it's a common application, and our users seem to have a great impression of it. On a project to project level, we are fully supportive. This being said, when "push comes to shove," if we have to make the difficult decision to replace VLC, we will. There may also be similar conversations about doing this in a wider Ubuntu context at that point, but there are no guarantees in either direction yet.

Aside from these points, we continue to focus on refreshing our translation support. We're working across all of Ubuntu to ensure that non-English users and distributors have a much easier experience. We're also working on accessibility: are there any other remaining elements we can add to help with the story for those users who are unable to e.g. view the screen, or hear audio? This is something we care about doing, in the most efficient, refined, and smooth possible way. If you'd like to help with translations, for the time being, we will point you towards LXQt's Weblate instance. This information will change in the coming months, in a good direction.

Our Quest

Our quest for the 25.10 cycle can be summarized as the following:

  • We will continue to stabilize, refine, and refresh Lubuntu as appropriate, in that order.
  • We will continue to value contributions to the wider Ubuntu community as our parent project, being a fully-community project ourselves. (No Lubuntu Member currently works for Canonical, purely out of coincidence.)
  • We will switch to Wayland in time for the release of 25.10.
  • We will completely remove Qt 5 from the Lubuntu ISO in time for 26.04 LTS' release.
  • We will expand our member base and continue to invigorate our community, benefitting the wider Ubuntu community and inspiring positive change in the process.

This list may change over time, but this is the list being communicated by Lubuntu's current Release Manager, subject to override by the Lubuntu Council and/or the Lubuntu Team Lead. In short, it isn't final, but should help you get an understanding of what we're looking to accomplish over the next cycle.

In particular, we would like to thank the following people for being absolutely incredible this cycle, both in their collaborative spirit and technical excellency. Without you, this release could have turned out much differently.

Our Lubuntu Members:

John Faulk, who has helped us with the switch to Fancy Menu.

Our guiding beacons of light within Canonical:

Last but not least, the Ubuntu Release Team, especially Utkarsh Gupta, for all their (seemingly) tireless efforts this cycle. Please join us in thanking them for their efforts, especially this time around; they deserve as much praise and support as our community can provide them.

If you believe we forgot your name, it was not on purpose. If we listed every single contributor to Lubuntu, that list would take up half the announcement. If you weren't mentioned and you have helped Lubuntu this cycle, even implicitly: thank you. We really appreciate you.

Onwards, it's time to go Questing!

04 Feb

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.