Lubuntu 18.04 LTS is coming this April with the LXDE desktop

Apr 3, 2018 13:11 GMT  ·  By

Even if we're not seeing them in the news as often as we'd like, the Lubuntu and Lubuntu Next operating systems continue to be developed in the background, and developer Simon Quigley shares with us today some details about the upcoming releases.

Lubuntu, the most lightweight official Ubuntu flavor, had a hard time these past few months, during the development cycle of the upcoming Bionic Beaver operating system series, with all sorts of problems, but its small development team managed to get past them and continued to work on both Lubuntu and Lubuntu Next.

While Lubuntu Next offers us the more modern LXQt desktop environment, built on the latest Qt 5 technologies, the upcoming Lubuntu 18.04 LTS release is still using the LXDE desktop environment by default. The switch from LXDE to LXQt for Lubuntu is in the testing phase since Lubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), but progress is being made on this front.

"We frequently get a question along the lines of "Why aren't you shipping LXQt as the default yet?" The answer to these questions is that while we are working towards it (and progress is being made), we don't want to jeopardize our userbase by shipping something that isn't quite perfect yet," said developer Simon Quigley.

Lubuntu Next 18.10 to adopt the Calamares graphical installer

The good news we want to share with you today is that the Lubuntu team decided to adopt the Calamares universal installer framework as default graphical installer for Lubuntu Next. They are working with the Kubuntu and KDE Neon teams on the implementation, which could be enabled by default in Lubuntu Next 18.10.

For those who want to use Lubuntu with the LXQt desktop instead of LXDE, Lubuntu Next 18.04 will be available for early adopters this spring along with the Lubuntu 18.04 LTS operating system, which comes with three years of support. Unfortunately, Lubuntu Next 18.04 will only be supported for nine months, until January 2019.

Until then, both Lubuntu 18.04 LTS and Lubuntu Next 18.04 are participating in the Final Beta preview as part of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) Final Beta release this Thursday, April 5, 2018, if you want to help with testing or just want to take them for a test drive on your personal computers.