Hi, I’m Smeghead67 I’ve been into Foss, since 2007. I started off on windows using firefox and thunderbird. I tried and liked Kubuntu and used it until the other day when this 13 year old laptop was struggling. I was running LTS and keeping it vanilla. So I needed a change. I wanted to stay in the Ubuntu flavors so I’m trying this. I’m liking it so far also.
So, why are you using Lubuntu?
I needed a lightweight distro based on Ubuntu for my older laptop. At the time, that was Lubuntu with LXDE. I had tried other flavors such as Xubuntu and while Xubuntu itself also tried to be lightweight, Lubuntu with LXDE was definitely a different comparison. My laptop wasn’t that old but I knew it was dying based on its performance with Windows (which it was running). Changing to Linux/Lubuntu pretty much breathed new life into it.
My decision to put a Debian/Ubuntu flavor on my laptop was purely based on the community consensus at the time of what distro was well supported and being well-supportive of proprietary hardware or perhaps of which distro tried to make it easy. At the time, that was Ubuntu (even on distrowatch; specifically Linux Mint).
My personal opinion on that is that Ubuntu still makes it easier than most. I don’t agree with everything Canonical does (e.g. snaps) and I don’t agree with everything done with Ubuntu (i.e. Gnome) but out of all the distros out there, I think Ubuntu at least makes some kind of effort to make things “just work” for those who like Debian systems.
I tried Arch once and I didn’t see the appeal. It was just yet another way to do the same thing… GNU/Linux itself is a huge ecosystem on its own and one of the things that drives the experience you get is basically the kernel. Different projects just use different software to deliver the experience they want to give people…but under the hood, they’re all using Linux.
I use Lubuntu instead of regular Ubuntu because even though Canonical tailors Gnome to be usable, Gnome itself is still a bad desktop (IMO). My personal favorite is Linux Mint but for my laptop, Lubuntu has done wonders. I was worried about the change to LXQt but overall the maturity has been rather pleasant.
I haven’t seen any drawbacks as of yet except for the ones inherited from Ubuntu (e.g. snaps) and while I can’t claim any software is perfect, Lubuntu gets the job done for me. I support their new focus and I wish them the best moving forward.
Can I cheat and just link to something to save some time?
That’s why I use Linux - but Lubuntu is mentioned and the reasons are the same.
I have a Macbook Air from 2017 aka MacOS and it was starting to get annoyingly sluggish especially when editing. I realize this laptop is not meant for heavy duty, nevertheless I’ve got heavy things that need to be done (as in, I use Shotcut / Kdenlive / Audacity / Handbrake, etc).
I had to switch to something lighter or I was going to lose my mind. And voila; with Lubuntu, the RAM usage dropped from an average 7GB out of available 8GB to 1 to 2 GB / 8 GB. The computer is finally ultra responsive and I don’t have to listen to the spinning fan nearly as much.
And hey, it’s Linux. I’ve tried distros here and there since 2004. I never stuck with Linux since I needed the infamous Adobe Suite. Now I feel I can survive without it somehow. Sure, Krita is not exactly Photoshop. Sure, Shotcut may not be as complete as Premiere. But I can get around many things and achieve the same results if I keep reading and studying the software around.
I think of Lubuntu as Ubuntu (just a different desktop), and Ubuntu is not all I use as I use Debian & Ubuntu somewhat equally.
I’m no fan of GNOME; yes it’s functional & I can use it efficiently for a day or sometimes a couple of days before I’m pulling my hair out; so whilst it’s installed on my system, I only rarely use it (a change is as good as a holiday?).
I’m a lover of multiple desktops, so as already mentioned this box has GNOME installed on it; Lubuntu’s LXQt, but also Xubuntu’s Xfce. I love Xfce too. My Lubuntu/LXQt desktop is made up to match my Xfce one, so it’s easy for me to forget which I’m using (the WM themes the easiest give away)
Why Lubuntu/LXQt - it’s light, efficient & stays out of my way, letting me do what I need to do.
Xfce does that too, and GNOME can on occasion (as in ‘stay out of my way’, GNOME isn’t light & even modern Xfce isn’t as light as it was though it’s not too bad when using GTK3 apps) but I find GNOME regularly getting in the way (thus the hair pulling). I could use MATE or KDE too, but again I’m back to pulling my hair out every so often (which I can’t keep doing!) thus I stick where it just works for me.
FYI: This is a 2009 dell desktop; so a light desktop is somewhat important. Yes I’ve got newer boxes (with noiser video fans), but Lubuntu is light enough I can use this box that I’d prefer and not lose out.
I’m probably using Ubuntu 70% of the time (and that’s mostly Lubuntu); but I’m using GNU/Linux 100% of the time
Yup. That sums it up nicely.
When the switch was made to LXQt, I was dubious that it’d be the same - but it really is quite similar in resource usage. It’s still not a heavy/awkward desktop environment, for which I’m quite grateful.
It’s light weight and stays out of way. I have 10 year old desktop with i3-540 and 4GB RAM with GA-H55M-S2 motherboard.
Plus perfectly suitable for three coolest programming language - Common LISP, Erlang and Haskell. All you need is Vim and Emacs, both of which takes very less RAM.
My only gripe is there is no low memory usage web browser available. Launch Firefox or Chrome and each can easily takes 1-1.5 GB of RAM very easily with couple of tabs only. But that is not Lubuntu issue.
- Lubuntu.
why do i hate snaps?
I do not get it
No, not you hate snaps. 𝐼 𝒽𝒶𝓉𝑒 𝓈𝓃𝒶𝓅𝓈.
Snaps was (in my opinion) a way for Canonical to reinvent the wheel of what already existed as AppImage but added their own twist to it. One of the reasons Linux Mint does not use snaps by default despite being also based on Ubuntu is because Canonical made certain risky decisions that benefited Canonical more as a company rather than the community at large. I think the whole conflict arose due to some licensing disagreements but I don’t truly understand the issue myself.
At the end of the day, I feel Canonical has warranted the criticism its received over the years for the weird changes its made for Ubuntu and the stuff related to it. Just like now how I don’t understand why Ubuntu seems adamant on replacing grub with systemd—I don’t get how that benefits the community in any way aside from the security vulnerability the whole change is based on.
Again, I’m not a developer so my particular standpoint will differ from those actually deep in the weeds. From an ethical standpoint, I don’t think Canonical has their users best interest 100% when it comes to snaps despite snaps offering greater default security. I don’t deny the benefits introduced using snaps over standard packaging but snaps too have their shortcomings and limitations.
For the record, and despite my preference for Flatpak, I still condemn Red Hat for their creation of Flatpak even though they can say they did it because of Canonical’s bad decisions with snaps. The whole point of AppImage was to have a single way of getting a package prepared and only have that one thing available to Linux users. What both Canonical and Red Hat have done now is literally create alternatives for what should have been a single solution.
Some might argue, “well Linux often sees benefit from having alternative solutions and forks” but that’s beside the point. The primary benefit that came out of anything related to these containerized packages was that there would only be ONE single method devs had to worry about when it came to packaging. The sandboxing stuff came later and was optional for AppImages but the whole point was to make available ONE kind of package for a particular software for any Linux distro and user to utilize.
Also, if my tone comes off confrontational, please understand I’m not arguing with you nor am I trying to say snaps are entirely bad… I just get really upset whenever I talk about either of these three things because their existence is practically a paradox in my view. Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. Thanks!
I came into Lubuntu with 12.04.
It was the only OS that booted my various machines without flaw, albeit I use a simple extlinux boot, the hardware detection is flawless.
I worked out how to backup the OS on a USB drive and boot it on
the other machines, mirror itself on the hard drive and hey presto, my OS is replicated on another machine. The USB also serves as a backup.
My main machines are still 12 year old ZBOXes ID10-ID12.
I tried many distros in those 12 years, but I always came back to Lubuntu.
I don’t mind using old versions either.
18.04 is still my main and I’m still trying out 20.04.
There’s stuff I’m not a fan of e.g Muon, QTerminal, XscreenSaver…
but most of that can be replaced. The size of the install,
it’s speed and unobtrusiveness outweighs any of the downsides.
I’m avoiding snaps if at all possible. They feel slow and bloated, appear different, always some background snap task (snapd?) running at startup, loads of squashfs mounts,
and it doesn’t auto cleanup unused snapd revisions.
But I have to use it for old software that’s just not supported anymore (kompozer). Either that or I boot up an old copy of 12.04, which is not something I dislike.
Recently I tried LXLE which struggled and froze on an old laptop. Oddly, it was not it’s performance that put me off. But it’s rather bizarre TLP power configuration. Another similar case was Antix’s config gui scripts. Lubuntu always looked more ‘polished’ in comparison.
Why you should use Lubuntu is entirely your own discretion. Just try a few distros in e.g. VirtualBox, and come to a conclusion which one is fit for you.
I just happen to like the way the LXQt-desktop works. Lubuntu gives me a stable, nicely polished implementation of that desktop. Also important for me, Lubuntu/LXQt runs fine on older hardware.
Some twentyfive years ago, besides Windows, I’ve been using mostly Red Hat, Slackware and Gentoo based Linux systems. I can hardly remember the names of the different desktops I’ve used. What I do remember is that none of those desktops appealed to me. That only Windows had support for my semi professional sound card was another important factor for staying on that platform.
Around the year 2010 I got frustrated with Windows when my new and cheap laptop (“Designed for Windows XP”) started underperforming after a Windows update. After I’d installed Ubuntu 10.10 the world changed for me.
Finally a free and polished distribution had arrived that was perfect for my laptop and my needs. It took not long before my sound card got proper support, and I stopped using Windows at home completely.
After reading about Lubuntu, which had claims to perform better on older PC’s with less memory and CPU power, I changed my laptop to Lubuntu. And yes, it was more agile than Ubuntu. At first, I was not so keen on the Lubuntu user experience, but I got used to it.
Now I really love Lubuntu. In fact - I did not know that at first - it turned out that I love Lubuntu’s implementation of LXDE.
Several years ago I had some worries what would happen with ‘my beloved Lubuntu’ when the migration of LXDE to LXQt was announced. It turned out well. In fact, the migration has made the user experience even better.
The Lubuntu team deliver a great desktop, and I hope to be using their distribution for many years to come. It seems that stability of their product is important for the team. More important than quick implementation of the latest LXQt version. Personally I think that is a good thing.
Recently I am developing more and more worries about the direction Canonical is going with Ubuntu. I read 'TRG’s post about ‘snap’ etc. So far, the impact seems to be limited. At least, not more dangerous than what data other corporations already collect about me. However, I would like to be able to confirm myself what compiled software is supposed to do, by reading the source code, line for line. Or at least have trust in a group of people who have verified that for me. That’s the whole idea, and I think ‘snap’ gives that away.
Long time ago, around 2000, I, the end user of a Gentoo system, had in fact the choice: or download compiled packages, or compile packages myself. In fact, it was possible to build and install a whole Gentoo system from scratch. Well, it took ages (or say days), but I used to do that. I kept on doing so in the noughts, before I gave up on Linux and refocussed on Windows (for said reason, not for the compile time effort).
Well, to round up. In my opinion is open source software (and its implementation) all about choices. For now I like Ubuntu and the LXQt desktop on Lubuntu. I can’t thank the teams of the LXQt project, and of Lubuntu and Ubuntu enough for that.
Luckily, for me and you, we all have the freedom to make a choice out of several excellent desktops (all in their own right great), and several excellent Linux distributions (also all in their own right great).
At the end of the day, it is our choice. For now I stick with Lubuntu because I like the interface and the underlying Ubunty suits me.
Who knows what will happen in the future.
Well I’ve been using Lubuntu for quite some time, 
Its really satisfying as my machines - I’m using two different machines with Lubuntu 
, Besides using Ubuntu in other machine!
All of my machines are working fine, no need to update specially my machines specifications are very low, But I’m amazed with the performance
So keep it up Lubuntu
Thank You! 
Hmm! I use old outdated junk desktops which I put together using parts from other old outdated junk desktops.
A low resource demanding Linux distro is a must and Lubuntu fits the requirement well and I like it’s plain and simple desktop environment.
As for Snaps for me they work okay and yes they are slow to open the first time after a system restart or at least the browsers are.
I’ll give Snaps a fair test run I don’t find them to be annoying and I’m sure they have some good features along with some bad features.
Anyhow time will tell what happens with Snaps.
Anyway Lubuntu 22.04 is a new release and it has Snaps and if you don’t like it that don’t use it no one is forcing anyone to use it.
Because I like using my processing power for programs, not for some hulking behemoth of a background process juggler.
I use virtualization quite a bit, and Lubuntu works very nicely within a virtual machine, even if you only hand it 2 GB of RAM. It also is amazingly good for diagnostic and maintenance work - pop in a live USB and do what thou wilt. Taking disk images is a breeze with Lubuntu, dd, and a decent external hard drive. You don’t have the bulk of Ubuntu, the difficulties of Windows, or the terrifying complexity of Arch - it’s just plug-n-play. (Don’t get me wrong - Ubuntu is great for some things, Arch is great for some things, and sometimes you don’t have any choice but to use Windows, but Lubuntu is really good IMO.) I also have a particularly old Chromebook that gets pretty steady use thanks to Lubuntu.
I need a modern updated patched Linux OS for performance profiling of my custom applications. I like to run this testing on a variety of old and new machines. The slowest of the machines that can run a modern patched OS almost always quickly shows inefficiencies / performance issues in my code.
My only real choices are Debian and Lubuntu as they have many of the latest packages I can install quickly. Those two provide a relatively small functional patched OS base mostly with applications I need including a functional simple low resource desktop.
I wrote to this thread earlier that I was using Lubuntu on an old Macbook Air, Late 2017 model. Well, that unit now blew up - the battery got swollen and CPU partly damaged; long story short it was probably some weird overcharge effect.
I now bought Lenovo Ideapad Slim 3. Because I knew I would never again go back to Apple because I happily use Linux as my daily driver, specifically, Lubuntu. And Lenovo seems to be the company to go with as they make their hardware Linux compatible. At least generally speaking.
I could now technically run Zorin OS smoothly etc if I wanted to. And hey, that is a pretty neat distro. But even its light edition (XFCE) is considerably heavier than Lubuntu. It just is. You’ll realize on old hardware or when you use it for a few weeks.
And why waste the power you have, even on a top of the line gaming laptop, on merely running the system itself? I don’t see the point. I love seeing the laptop not struggling one bit, the smoothness, the temperatures staying cool, the longer battery life, that I can have more juice available for heavier applications such as Kdenlive, Krita or Reaper, when I need them.
Trust me if you haven’t tried it; the difference between LXQt/PcManFM-Qt and Xfce/Thunar is night and day.
Even if I get my top of the line laptop of the year with 600 cores and 512gb of RAM, I will still choose Lubuntu.
I was looking for something to put onto my quite old laptop and at that time Lubuntu was advertising itself as focused on performance (as primary priority, not one among several “priorities”).
Since that time - mostly from inertia and lack of time for experimenting with something else.
I am a new user to Lubuntu… I needed to bring a Dell Chromebox back to life and needed something lightweight and also a Windows type desktop environment as I am back and forth between Windows as well. You know how that muscle memory works.
Lubuntu fit the bill perfectly.
Everything is responsive and with LXQt things are where you would expect them to be. To be honest I like it so much even if I had more powerful hardware or need to install it on different hardware, it will be Lubuntu!
Thanks to the everyone participating and maintaining it!