14 DAY TRIAL // Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley is announcing today, February 7, 2017, the upcoming deprecation of daily build ISO images for the PowerPC (PPC) hardware architecture for the upcoming Lubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system.
As you probably know already, the Ubuntu Linux developers discussed last year the removal of support for 32-bit PowerPC systems, which means that starting with Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) there won't be any ISO images available to let you install Ubuntu or any of the official flavors on the PowerPC (PPC) 32-bit architecture.
At the moment, Ubuntu MATE and Lubuntu appear to be the only official flavors to offer PowerPC install mediums, but it looks like the Lubuntu team will stop developing them after the Feature Freeze development stage of Lubuntu 17.04, which starts next week on February 16, 2017.
"I noticed we still had PowerPC Daily Builds enabled, and after the Technical Board decided to remove the 32-bit powerpc architecture in future releases, Lubuntu will no longer be able to have a PowerPC Zesty release past Feature Freeze," said Simon Quigley in the mailing list announcement.
Lubuntu PowerPC daily builds to be removed February 13, 2017
According to Simon Quigley, it looks like the Lubuntu PowerPC daily build ISO image will be removed from the main server on February 13, 2017, and new ones will no longer be made available to download. Therefore, if you still want to install Lubuntu on older PowerPC 32-bit systems, which is NOT recommended because it won't be supported, you can still download the ISOs.
The Lubuntu developer also informs those running the LTS (Long Term Support) version of Lubuntu on a PPC machine that support will not go away, and they will receive security updates until the end of life of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) on April 2021. The Lubuntu team also promises to support Lubuntu 16.04 LTS on PowerPC until April 2019.
In the meantime, development of the Lubuntu 17.04 operating system continues as the team prepares for the first Beta release of the Zesty Zapus series, which will land later this month on February 23 only for opt-in flavors, including Lubuntu, of course.
Lubuntu 17.04 should be the first release of the flavor to ship with the LXQt desktop environment. It will be unveiled on April 13, 2017, along with the rest of the official Ubuntu flavors. The Final Beta is expected on March 23, according to the release schedule.