The "lacks" of Lubuntu 20.04 vs 18.04

Hi to Everybody,

in these first days of use, it seems to me that sometimes Lubuntu 20.04 doesn’t have some functionalities that the 18.04 had.
For example, there isn’t a very useful program like guvcview: in this period you can easily record a video lesson for students with it being off-line.

Maybe, we could suggest to the Lubuntu Team all that ‘lacks’ we find between Lubuntu 18.04 and 20.04…

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There is a great deal of fantastic software available in the Ubuntu archive that is easy to install. I am sure the choices the Lubuntu team picks to install will not please everyone every time. I think the real value with the Ubuntu backing is having the software choices available.
That being said, we do appreciate the feedback about the applications that are installed and the usefulness they have. Also, if there is a application that most users would utilize please let us know that too.

Is webcam software something many people utilize? I do see the value in it, I just don’t know if it is for everyone.

I personally like simple screen recorder for screencast things. If you want to throw the webcam in and go with a little more feature rich program vokoscreen-ng is a good choice. Both of those are qt based applications so that is an added bonus.

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You know what they say— you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

Lubuntu is always going to be resistant to adding anything and reluctant to change anything for fear of a bigger footprint, but there are exceptions. The justification necessary would be demonstrating the requirements are relatively low (especially in comparison to particular values) and/or a wide need for this among the user base (i.e. everyone would be complaining about it).

For those wanting to make suggestions, here are some things to consider:

  • If it doesn’t use Qt and isn’t toolkit agnostic, chances of inclusion are close to zero.
  • If it’s not in the archives and not in the Debian archives, that is going to be problematic. We can package it, but ideally we want to package it in Debian first and they’re harder to deal with.
  • If it’s not actively maintained upstream, it’s not worth our time. A major reason to change from LXDE is because its development (including fixing bugs) is basically dead.

Not me!

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Running Arch at the moment:

sudo pacman -S guvcview
 
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (3) gsl-2.6-1  guvcview-common-2.0.6-4  guvcview-2.0.6-4

Total Download Size:   1.74 MiB
Total Installed Size:  5.59 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] n

Not very big of an install.

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Yes, you are right.
My concern is the addition of too many dependencies adding no QT-specific software.
For example, I don’t like the actual task manager, qps and I prefer the simplicity and the clarity that LXtask has.
(I have to admit that effectively I installed LXtask on Lubuntu 20.04, but it’s a secret between us :shushing_face:).
I am also personally fond to Gdebi and Synaptics (and I miss them a lot), but I would like to limit myself to install packages more specific to my distro and its DE, that in this case is actually QT-related.

Webcam software: if you have to prepare a videotutorial or a remote lesson for students, they are very useful since you can prepare the material being offline. If you remotely work in a school or in a company, due to this Coronavirus period, those kind of softwares are essentials and with Lubuntu 20.04 you have to look for by yourself. Nothing dramatic, but it would be more comfortable to have at least one choice already installed.

qapt-deb-installer and Muon are almost 1:1 copies. How do you see them as different outside of the looks?

If you don’t consider the current situation, I think this is something a relatively small number of users actually need.

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Maybe you’re right, it’s only a matter of habit: looking at them again, they don’t seem so different…

Well, in this period we can see a mass diffusion (and use) of webcam-related applications.
With people learning to use that kind of communication, I suppose it’s something where Lubuntu could be found very prepared, giving it an extra gear.
VokoscreenNG (when people want something more than guvcview) until now has been the solution I’ve suggested, but now the choice can better look to a lot of interesting QT applications. Maybe, sometimes, they are not so light…

I wouldn’t have updated so soon, with 18.04 LTS supported for another year by the Lubuntu team and Canonical providing maintenance updates into 2023 (correct me if I’m wrong).

I’m on the OP’s side with applications. Many in v18 offered unique functionalities and/or a level of polish not found in the current (v20) set (or even on other OSs). I hope to see things become more consistent across them over time (e.g. fonts, toolbar icons) and will be sure to make some suggestions in the near future. Of course many can be customised but it’s a lot of work for novices.

Canonical provides only maintenance and security fixes for the main repository.
Everything related to Lubuntu (the desktop and configuration files) is packaged by the team of Lubuntu.
Like every other flavour also, the team of Lubuntu supports the own packages for LTS releases during 3 years. So the support will end in april 2021.
Because LXDE (the upstream project) is more dead then alive, you should not expect to see any greater bug fixes or security fixes for LXDE on 18.04.

Well, I’m trying in these days Lubuntu 20.04 on a ‘horrible’ Acer Aspire 5732Z: it was already a cheap low-end notebook at the times when I bought it (2011).
It’s a good comparison to better understand the staleness of a distro.
Here, I have several partitions to do my tests, for the ‘real daily’ use on the machines I manage I mainly make use of a Lubuntu LTS version (in this moment 18.04).
All this being said that the experience I’m doing with the 20.04 version is quite smooth and nice: there are about 100 megabytes more in idle (in my case, about 380 megabytes vs 280MB), the needed time for loading is (quite) more, but once loaded the ‘reactivity’ of the whole system seems better. Overall, in a real and normal daily use (consider that I don’t play games) the two systems seem to me rather analogous. I clearly see the difference in term of speed with Debian 10 LXDE (faster), for example, but for me it worths to pay some more time to have the comfort that gives Lubuntu, a distro that is really very well packaged. So, for the moment, I’m seeing less and less ‘lacks’ between the two LTS versions, nay I see a way to have a lot of QT applications that before made no sense to install in a light distro…

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Specifics? Details? The point in this thread is not to complain idly but to actually try to provide some constructive criticism.

Skanlite: I’ve just discovered that it doesn’t allow to save the scanned document in pdf format, so no multiple pages support…with simple-scan you could.

May I suggest X-sane instead of Skanlite?