14 DAY TRIAL // Lubuntu maintainer Simon Quigley was kind enough to inform us today about the availability of the first daily build ISO images of the upcoming Lubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, with the LXQt desktop environment.
The development cycle of the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system started two months ago when Canonical's Adam Conrad gave the green light to all maintainers and developers involved in the project, and the first Alpha milestone is now approaching fast.
Simon Quigley of the Lubuntu team took things very seriously for this cycle and published earlier what would appear to be the very first Live ISO images of Lubuntu Next 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), the umbrella under which the development of Lubuntu Linux built around the LXQt desktop environment takes place these days.
We know that many Lubuntu fans want to hear news about an official Lubuntu image with LXQt, so there you have it. You can download the ISOs right now and give them a try, but please be aware of the fact that they're very buggy at the moment of writing and it may take a day or two for them to be refreshed.
The future of Lubuntu with LXQt as default desktop is undecided
We spoke to Simon Quigley about what the future would look like for Lubuntu with LXQt by default, and he told us that we probably shouldn't get all that excited because the team decided to have the final Lubuntu 17.10 release ship with both an LXDE and an LXQt edition. We take this as good news because LXQt is here to stay for Lubuntu.
Right now, the plan is to have a working ISO image ready for general public testing as part of next month's Lubuntu 17.10 Alpha 1 development release. If things go well from there, and users give good feedback, chances are Lubuntu 17.10 will offer a variant with the LXQt desktop environment after all, so fingers crossed.
Below is a screenshot of Lubuntu Next 17.10 Daily Build 20170524.2 with the LXQt 0.11.1 desktop environment, courtesy of Simon Quigley, because the ISO didn't boot on our hardware and the theming was weird when we tried it in a virtual machine. Again, these things will be fixed soon and we shall have a working image in no time.
https://t.co/wUaKbOe3Cf it built! :DTime to test it out locally... — Simon Quigley (@tsimonq2) May 24, 2017