Has Lubuntu abandoned its philosophy of being a lightweight distribution?

Lubuntu Support
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Some old Lubuntu users I’ve come across online say that since Lubuntu abandoned LXDE and switched to LXQT, it has abandoned its philosophy of being a lightweight distribution. Are these rumors true? Has Lubuntu now abandoned its philosophy of being a lightweight distro?

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In short: no.

I’m sure if you search around, you’ll see more comprehensive answers to this question.

The long story short is that Lubuntu continues the philosophy it always had: a functional, practical set of software that people can use to get things done. Components of that packageset are chosen based on several factors, but the amount of RAM/CPU usage is always one of those concerns.

In another way of looking at it, Lubuntu is absolutely not a lightweight distro, at least in its strictest definition. In fact, most so-called lightweight Linux distros are heavy because they happen to include GUIs. GUIs naturally consume a rather large amount of resources, so any time you want to have them, you can expect to consume a lot more resources. Of course, Lubuntu’s always had a GUI. And so do most lightweight distros.

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The switch from LXDE to LXQt was covered by the LXDE development team years ago, as GTK3 was heavy, and they found that Qt was far lighter (read PCMan’s blogs about this); thus many LXDE devs joined with Razor-Qt devs creating a lighter replacement of GTK2 LXDE in LXQt, and the then partial port of GTK3 LXDE was abandoned (it’s since been picked up and completed, despite weight issue of GTK3 and GTK3 only in maintenance mode now anyway prior to deprecation)

Lubuntu followed that LXDE developer decision, and switched from the lighter GTK2 LXDE to the newer light replacement LXQt, as light matters, as written about here and elsewhere, where we said “Lubuntu will stay light”, we focus on light, just no longer old.

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I don’t think so based on my use on my old Frankenstein builds.

Usually a Intel core 2 duo e7400.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/36500/intel-core2-duo-processor-e7400-3m-cache-2-80-ghz-1066-mhz-fsb/specifications.html

8.0 GB of DDR3 ram and Intel integrated graphics and mechanical hard drive.

May not be as lightweight as LXLE although still fast as all get out.

Lubuntu these days still breaths new life into older desktop hardware imo.

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