
Lubuntu is taking a new direction - niutech
https://lubuntu.me/taking-a-new-direction/
======
apatters
> our main focus is shifting from _(providing a distribution for old
> hardware)_ to a _(functional yet modular distribution focused on getting out
> of the way and letting users use their computer.)_

I like Lubuntu and often use it for low powered devices and sometimes devices
that aren't so low powered. This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion
because the old focus is a lot clearer than the new focus. Here's how you
should have said it:

 _We are focusing our resources on developing a fast, clean, functional
distribution for devices manufactured in the last ten years._

Then you can go on to explain the rationale (which is all quite sensible, if
you don't want to support hardware that's 15-20 years old, you don't have to,
it's a pretty niche market anyway).

~~~
asadjb
I have never used Lubuntu other than trying it out a few times, so this is
just going off of the content in the article.

> This phrasing is a PR blunder in my opinion because the old focus is a lot
> clearer than the new focus

To me, it seems that they ran the numbers (kudos to them for taking an
empirical approach) and figured out that their original USP was now no longer
unique enough, and they need to do something different to stay in the game.

But this article makes it seem like they haven't figured out what that
_something different_ is. They list a number of things they are going to
provide, including: \- leverage modern, Qt-based technologies and programs to
give users a functional yet modular experience \- Lubuntu will continue to be
a transparent and open distribution \- create and maintain complete
documentation

And a few others. But none of these seem to be different enough from the other
great choices available as Ubuntu flavors.

That's just my read on the article anyway.

~~~
apatters
Yep that's a great point, maybe they are not communicating what the unique
benefits of Lubuntu will be in the future, or maybe they don't actually know
what they'll be.

Right now Lubuntu's niche is really clear for me, if I want a lightweight,
general purpose distro I use Xubuntu. If I want a _really_ lightweight,
general purpose distro I use Lubuntu. (A step beyond that if I wanted "so damn
light there are probably a lot of things I don't be able to do, I would think
of Puppy or Damn Small or something, neither of which I've needed to touch in
a long time, not sure they're even still maintained.)

So if Lubuntu is no longer my _super-_ light distro, erm, what is it. A
competitor to Xubuntu?

(Total side note, I really love the space of light, clean, functional desktop
operating systems. The most exciting development in computing for me
personally would be if someone figured out how to commercialize one as a
competitor to Windows and Mac. If I thought there was a good business model
I'd start that company myself.)

~~~
pweissbrod
In my experience such "lightweight" distros, over time, accumulate expanded
functionality/compatibility/surface area and inevitably/gradually become
"heavier".

Then the community complains "X" is too heavy, we need a lightweight system!
and the cycle repeats itself.

~~~
dmix
Which is why ArchLinux is so nice that it doesn't suffer from this type of
growth by nature of its design. You can very easily layer lightweight
frontends on a very reliable core.

~~~
krageon
Putting Arch and reliable in vicinity to each other is stretching it a little.

------
chx
One of my friends was saying how her old Mac Pro with dual X5670 CPUs was one
of the fastest machines for video transcoding she ever saw. That's a little
bit less than ten years old but still older than Sandy Bridge. Someone did the
math and it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this
pair of CPUs in multithread performance
[https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-
dual-x5670.1963388/#...](https://hardforum.com/threads/replacing-
dual-x5670.1963388/#post-1043712895) Obviousy since we are talking of 8 new
cores matching 12 old cores the single thread performance will be 50% faster.

Wait, what? 50% faster? Is that all? I mean, many tasks are still single
threaded and from 2010 to 2018 we have grown 50% in single thread and 100% in
multithread? If things were going the "old way" then in 8 years would've seen
a 2^(8/1.5) -- well over _thirty times_ speedup (Moore's law as stated by
David House who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months).
You can see some of that
[http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm](http://3dfmaps.com/CPU/cpu.htm) here.

No wonder there's no point focusing on old CPUs any more.

~~~
mrb
« _it turns out today a top consumer (not HEDT) CPU barely matches this pair
of CPUs_ »

Well, the X5670 was a high-end 2P server CPU sold for $1400
([https://ark.intel.com/products/47920/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-X5...](https://ark.intel.com/products/47920/Intel-Xeon-
Processor-X5670-12M-Cache-2_93-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI)) so to fairly measure
how performance has improved, you should compare it to a similarly priced
product, like the AMD EPYC 7401 ([https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-
epyc-7401](https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-epyc-7401)). And, oh, look
at this: the SPECint_rate "h264ref" benchmark subcomponent, which measures
multithreaded video encoding performance, shows a 4.2× improvement (472 to
2000):

• X5670:
[https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2010q2/cpu2006-20100...](https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2010q2/cpu2006-20100329-10198.html)

• EPYC 7401:
[https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2017q4/cpu2006-20171...](https://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2017q4/cpu2006-20171211-50965.html)

Edit: oops, fixed major screw up. I had linked to SPECint numbers, instead of
SPECint_rate. The real improvement is 4.2× not 45×! Far from what Moore's Law
predicts (2^(8/1.5)) but still a very notable improvement. I'm sure your
friend would be happy to transcode 4× faster...

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Is it possible to buy a Mac Pro with an AMD EPYC 7401 CPU? Surely the fairer
comparison would be against the current top-of-the-range in Apple's lineup.

~~~
akvadrako
Except the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in a while, partially due to thermal
constraints. That isn't related to long-term progress, but an uneven cycle.

------
peatmoss
As an exercise, I threw OpenBSD and GNUStep on a machine the other day. I
wouldn’t say GNUStep provides the best Free/Open desktop, but I want to
believe that it could.

The thing is, many of the modern Linux desktops seem to be heavily wedded to a
lot of dconf and systemd infrastructure. OpenBSD has managed to build analogs
for enough of the heavily Linux-centric infrastructure that Gnome 3 depends
on, but man it’s clear that Gnome 3 was written with Linux and only Linux in
mind.

I didn’t see KDE in the OpenBSD ports when I looked, and I suspect it too is
because KDE has become wedded to Linux-only services.

XFCE remains the most portable full-featured Desktop environment and runs well
on OpenBSD.

But GNUStep... GNUStep is my biggest regret. GNUStep isn’t entirely comparable
to XFCE, because GNUStep isn’t a desktop. It’s more like all GTK plus dconf
plus all the desktop services required for interaction between GUI apps plus a
uniform display layer.

In short, GNUStep is more or less like Cocoa from macOS. Add GWorkspace, and
you have a solid reimplementation of macOS’s Finder.

I _wish_ GNUStep had caught on or that someone would inject new life into it.
There are apps that compile on both GNUstep and macOS. For whatever reason
macOS seems to attract better desktop apps—both Free and commercial.

Had GNUStep and not KDE or Gnome become the defacto *Nix desktop, I imagine
people would be writing macOS apps for free on Linux, and macOS users would be
recompiling apps to run on Linux... and not just Linux, but all the platforms
that GNUStep supports, like OpenBSD and Windows.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and why I thought to write this, is because GTK vs QT both feel
like lower potential toolkits. And GNUStep also feels very lightweight and
portable.

~~~
paulie_a
Honestly I remember trying gnustep, it was ugly. I can't even emphasis how
terrible it looked from a ux/UI perspective compared to literally every other
desktop.

~~~
peatmoss
Yup, they were doing the hard part of making application frameworks and
consistent APIs, and were always deferring window dressing. By contrast, old
school FVWM and later Enlightenment were pushing limits of themability without
really building anything of substance beyond literal window dressing.

No reason GNUStep couldn’t be as beautiful as anything else. Oddly, I find the
NeXT aesthetic oddly fresh looking today. I was struck by how good it looked
when I took a trip to the Living Computer Museum and played on their NeXT
cube. What’s old is new I guess.

Still, not supporting themes from the getgo was definitely a reason GNUStep
didn’t get traction early on, I’d

~~~
pjmlp
I stood in one FOSDEM presentation about 10 years ago, where they spent a
couple of hours speaking and demoing part of it, but it never seemed to have
moved beyond those presentations.

------
manaskarekar
I don't want to come across as ungrateful but I'm not very happy about this. I
haven't looked into the reasons for this change but I'm sure there are some
compelling ones to make such a big change.

LXDE based Lubuntu struck the perfect balance (for me) between:

\- Being minimal and lightweight

\- but works out of the box with enough batteries included

\- tons of community resources due to being a ~buntu

\- very, very customizable (I love my undecorated windows and no bullshit
shortcuts/decorations etc)

\- sane user experience, without any unnecessary bloat

\- LTS support (albeit shorter than other ~buntu releases).

Yes, I can achieve these things some other way, but Lubuntu hit this sweet
spot out of the box with minimal tweaking.

Maybe LXQt will be great, may be not, but at this point it reminds me of
Ubuntu 10.10 which, IMHO, was as refined as Ubuntu (or any linux distro at the
time) could be, and then they just decided to throw all that maturity and
refinement away and start from scratch.

I truly hope LXQt based Lubuntu succeeds, but it's a sad day to me.

~~~
devxpy
Ubuntu 10.10, huh.

I'm not old enough to have experienced that, but I can say that we have the
same thing happening with 16.04

They had it almost perfect and decided to throw it all out.

History does repeat itself...

~~~
bubblethink
>but I can say that we have the same thing happening with 16.04

Yes, 16.04 (unity 7) is peak desktop for years to come. Nothing else works
quite as well for me. Luckily, you can use unity 7 with 18.04 without too much
friction.

~~~
copperx
What do you use as a file manager? Ubuntu's built in one lacks the basic
functions that one might expect from Windows Explorer or the Finder (e.g., the
ability to rename multiple files, open folder as path in terminal, mount SMB
shares, see file previews).

~~~
bubblethink
With 16.04, I'm using the default bundled nautilus version. With 18.04, I
think nautilus lost some functionality. I haven't switched to 18.04 yet
though. So I don't know how serious it is. I don't use the file manager too
heavily. You can switch to nemo, dolphin or caja if it works better for you.
Not sure how nicely they all play with Unity. There was a patched nemo version
for Unity 7.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Worth noting that Dolphin devs have disabled it's use as superuser, ... I
can't comprehend why. Krusader is my fallback option.

------
antoineMoPa
I always loved Qt as a developer and hated it as a user. Every app/desktop
environment written in it seem buggy and expensive on RAM.

On the other side, I always loved GTK apps and their feel/design, but never
got to make anything big myself in GTK.

There are other points to this debate than RAM/Resources: Looks and feel,
philosophy, feature bloatedness, etc.

~~~
mrob
I used to love GTK apps, but GTK3 has become almost unusable. I used XFCE for
years, but now it's switched to GTK3 I've had to abandon it for LXDE (GTK2
version). Even something as simple as the XFCE text editor (Mousepad) now has
pointless animations that you can't turn off and it constantly flickers unless
you turn on compositing, which is useless latency increasing bloat. Everything
about GTK3 feels like it was designed by somebody who'd rather be working on
mobile apps. There's frequent animations deliberately wasting my time and
distracting me, and excessive whitespace deliberately wasting my pixels. Maybe
it's fixable with the complicated and unstable CSS based theming, but instead
of fighting the system it would be easier to switch to Qt based apps. Qt at
least appears to be designed for experienced users on desktops/laptops, not
morons on phones.

~~~
andai
The "Experienced users on desktops --> Morons on phones" trend seems to be
inescapable, especially in web design.

------
hd4
This says more about how efficient KDE has become than how LXQt is performing,
if they're feeling like KDE is eating LXQts lunch. I know people want choice
and all, but I think we have reached the point where it would make sense for
KDE to replace all other DEs purely for its sheer flexibility and performance.
With every other DE there is some trade-off, usually in resource usage. KDE at
start-up uses under 500mb with Kubuntu 18.04. Its the one reason I no longer
need to upgrade my hardware, and can use it till it breaks.

~~~
zanny
Additionally there are only three major memory hogs in KDE:

Akonadi, purely associated with the KDEPim stuff. You can just uninstall it
all without a fuss.

Baloo, the file scanner. You can disable this outright.

Plasmashell, which is the desktop applet engine. This is where I feel LXQT can
find its niche, by providing a simpler shell that uses less resources than the
plasmoid JS script container style the Plasma Shell uses.

Without any of these running a KDE desktop with system services etc included
is under 200MB, often under 100MB.

~~~
hd4
Honestly this entire post is a really good call, I didn't even realize whether
or not I need all these. Is there a simple wiki or something out there that
would help decide what can be disabled?

edit: found this [http://www.linux-
databook.info/?page_id=3728](http://www.linux-databook.info/?page_id=3728)

------
ArtWomb
Writing this comment on a 4th gen Core-i5 laptop running Lubuntu booted into
RAM. UX is just incredibly responsive. Up since Jun 1. And would probably run
forever ;)

But into the future I am very interested in restoring older laptops with
ChromeOS / Neverware. Especially if they meet the requirements for running the
Android / Linux container and studio. By mid-2020's chromebooks could account
for 5% of global pc market share.

~~~
StavrosK
I hadn't heard of Neverware before, so thanks for that. It looks like it's the
Chromebook OS, does it force you to use the Google apps? Basically, is it
usable without a Google account?

~~~
remir
As far as I know, except for a guest account, there's no local account on
Neverware, so you'll need a Google account to use it, which is unfortunate.

------
axaxs
I don't understand the rationale behind a separate
group/committee/website/idea for the same distro with different defaults. I
worked with the Antergos team, a team of 4 people, to write a distro that let
you pick and choose everything, from DE to browsers. While I've mainly faded
away they are still hard at it. In short, if we can support nearly every DE
with 4 volunteers, what are these *buntus spending their resources on?

~~~
michaelmrose
Antergos most emphatically isn't a distro it's just an installer for arch
Linux and quite frankly a poorly designed one that does not always actually
work.

After the installer runs if it actually works you aren't left with something
much different from a normal arch installation.

The actual distro developers have a lot of work to do as far as assembling a
wide range of components and often writing their own like package management
systems and recipes for building thousands of packages.

Its unsurprising that people writing 0.1% of distro badly doesn't require much
work.

~~~
Klover
Well that’s mean. But I have to agree that it doesn’t actually work 99% of the
time for me. It certainly is easier to install arch than it is trying to debug
cnchi. Arch requires so much typing, but at least the installation is
reliable.

~~~
michaelmrose
Its mean but its like they had one job... If it doesn't work start over and
make it work.

~~~
axaxs
I don't take offense to it personally as I no longer work on the project,
but...did you bother to open bug reports and share logs...or do you just throw
a fit on public forums? I still run the geo server used in installation, and
can assure you the vast majority (>99%) of folks do not have installation
troubles. If they do, they aren't reporting it.

Comments like these, which are common, are what pushed me away from open
source. Everyone feels entitled. Fix it, report bugs, ask for features.
Frankly, as an open source contributor, I want it to work for people, but, if
it doesn't work for your specific setup and you offer nothing of value, I
don't care that it doesn't.

~~~
michaelmrose
I believe you brought up antergos. The exact statement was.

"I worked with the Antergos team, a team of 4 people, to write a distro that
let you pick and choose everything, from DE to browsers. While I've mainly
faded away they are still hard at it. In short, if we can support nearly every
DE with 4 volunteers, what are these *buntus spending their resources on?"

You compared flavors of Ubuntu unfavorably with flavors of antergos and it's
neither throwing a fit nor entitled to point out that their resources
presumably are spent on making things that work.

Regarding antergos, I consulted their bug tracker my issue had been reported
already and wasn't fixed within the month I was interested in the matter and
it was impossible to use the older version without the bug because once online
it helpfully updated itself to the broken version. Further as far as I could
tell the bug was generic enough that it would have effected most users. It
simply crashed most of the way through a generic Ext4 install to bog standard
desktop hardware.

People throw around entitled as if giving away something for free exempts your
work from all critism. Sure you owe me nothing but if your work over promises
and under delivers I'm apt to say something so others don't waste their time.

~~~
axaxs
Firstly, I never compared flavors of Ubuntu as being lesser. I only asked why
each DE needed it's own community.

Secondly, you didn't report your issues, enough said. When you are a volunteer
team, you can't buy every piece of hardware. You absolutely depend on logs and
more importantly people willing to test. I had an early Ubuntu beta format my
partition when I hadn't selected to do so. I wouldn't say Ubuntu sucks and
should give up. It was addressed as a bug and fixed. Such is the nature of
software.

I don't think any promises were made. Antergos is an easy installer for arch.
I don't know if you know all that goes into an installer. It's way more than I
assumed when I signed up. Just writing py3 bindings for libparted, for
example, didn't exist. I upstreamed those to RedHat. For a distro, I'd
probably say the installer is 20 to 30 percent of the effort. Packaging is the
large remaining majority. *buntu flavors reuse packaging, and reuse an
installer.

I will never claim Antergos is perfect. It's not, and it does break as Arch
changes things. But saying 'it doesn't work' or 'start over' is dismissive and
borderline ignorant. Most of the issues over the years were due to changes in
Arch packaging, not due to bad code.

I won't reply further, feel free to stand on your soapbox and continue
badmouthing something you did nothing to help.

------
wink
I've never been a Lubuntu user but the problem I see is that the Linux distros
supporting x86 are getting rarer it seems.

I have a 2004 nx7010 (awesome laptop, at the time and also 8 years later) that
I sometimes use at home or grab to play around with and try out different
distros and OSes. I used to use ArchLinux but they stopped supporting x86 a
while ago. VoidLinux is also out. Right now I'm running OpenBSD 6.2 on it,
which is nice - but the short release cycle for a machine you only start up
like 3 times before the OS is EOLed kinda sucks. (Not OpenBSD's fault, of
course.)

So we'll see how long one can get a decent Ubuntu fallback solution (as in,
it's big enough that enough people work on it that it will mostly work out of
the box for these hobby projects of running old but not ancient hardware) for
x86.

~~~
crtasm
Last time I was hanging out in the xubuntu dev irc channel I think there was
some chat about how they were short on x86 hardware to test on. Emulation is
useful but isn't enough, if you need x86 consider running tests or donating
hardware.

~~~
wink
See, that's the problem - it's not a real "need" \- I have 2 old laptops I
don't want to throw out. If I was donating them, my need would vanish ;)

Sorry if it sounded like complaining, it wasn't my intention. I just think x86
is dying a slow death, there are not many "enthusiasts" like for e.g. 1980s or
1990s hardware where you have "this one ancient build everyone uses", but x86
has no discernible advantage over x64 these days (please don't name the the
RAM requirements for 32 bit builds now :P) - so x64 is in 99% of cases
superior and that's why it's rightfully supported. e.g. VAX, Sun SGI and C64
stuff is exciting, x86 in the age of x64 is just "older and slower" to most
people.

~~~
crtasm
Complaining, no not at all. Equally I didn't mean to direct those suggestions
directly at you :-)

------
dooyogi
Besides running on old hardware, the main benefit of distros like Lubuntu and
Xubuntu is that they run well in VirtualBox without reliable GPU support.
Ubuntu with Gnome 3 is almost unusable in VirtualBox.

~~~
mrweasel
When you see people recommend new Linux users that they could try Ubuntu in
VirtualBox, to get familier with it, I often wonder what kind of impression
they walk away with.

An modern Linux distribution in a vm, running on your laptop typically isn't
all that great an experience.

------
coleifer
While it's true that you can run plain-old Ubuntu on a 10-year-old machine
without problems, the growth in popularity of smaller ARM processors (rpi etc)
also creates demand for a lightweight linux distro. When I read the title I
assumed that Lubuntu's new direction was to move towards offering better
support for such devices. Guess they're going the opposite direction...too
bad.

~~~
andai
I wonder if that factored into the discussion. I'm also hearing a lot of buzz
about major OS (Windows, macOS) supporting ARM as a consumer platform in the
near future.

------
deltron3030
The main problem of desktop Linux is a lack of focus on audiences, most just
copy the generalist mindset that Apple and MS adhere to, hoping to get a piece
of that cake too.

There where Linux is very successfull it's focused on audiences, like sys
admins and devops people.

But there's no serious focused distro for web and cross platform app
designers/developers and other creators. That's something companies that make
design tools could pull off, where the graphical framework of their tool
becomes the framework of the OS, similar to how GTK (Gimp Tool Kit) was born,
but in a more professional way.

------
mistrial9
I am quite concerned that network security is pushing very usable software and
hardware to the junkyard. Is it possible that for a variety of reasons, it is
better to have something reliable and stable, than to throw out working
software because of intractable browser and network security problems ?

~~~
twblalock
It's better to throw out insecure software. Computers with security problems
get hacked and end up in botnets.

------
sonaltr
I'm not sure what to think about this - the next few releases would be the
deciding factor.

One of the main reasons I use Lubuntu is the fact that it got out of my way
(install Lubuntu, remove the handful of stuff that came pre-installed, install
i3 and get to work).

With my above setup, I would idle with just 250 MB of RAM usage and almost no
CPU usage. I loved that - as we have more and more electron apps (Slack,
Teams, Atom, GitKraken etc.).

I hope that bit of focus is not lost as not everyone has the affordability or
the ability and access to buy a 32 GB i9 Macbook Pro and develop on. (My
personal machine is a Thinkpad T420 with 8 GB RAM and a 250 GB SSD).

------
mastrsushi
I don't know if QT is part of the reason what makes KDE so sluggish, but if
thats the case, Lubuntu switching to LXQT might have a lot to do with this
challenge. If that's the case, I really have no idea why they're so hell bent
on the transition from GTK. If love for them to migrate to JWM, but last time
I checked the L in Lubuntu is for LXDE. Is there really any benefit in
adopting QT or are they just following what they see as the "forward"
direction. LXDE doesn't have to look glossy, skeumorphic, and outdated. A skin
is superficial, I would do anything to avoid QTumor.

~~~
genghizkhan
As far as I've seen, it's not. I used razor-qt when it was still an
independent project and I pretty much fell in love with the idea of it. Gnome
3 was being a PITA (I remember throwing things when my artfully crafted css
broke with an upgrade) and KDE hadn't crossed over into version 5. I'd tried
out XFCE at that point. It didn't excite me because I didn't want to get stuck
with GTK 2. I just downloaded razor-qt and realised that with a bit of spit,
shine and polish, this had the potential to become what LXDE was to Gnome. I'm
pretty happy about LXQT emerging from the LXDE/razor-qt merger.

Anyway, back to your question. razor-qt was pretty snappy on my machine,
leading me to conclude that KDE was slow because it was KDE. Akonadi, slow
animations, buggy widgets, you name it. I haven't tried KDE since then (this
was back in 2012 or so), but I've heard that the latest incarnations are
pretty snappy and light. Even if they aren't, I highly doubt LXQT will have
any problems with lag.

------
Anonymous4C54D6
How about we use a raspberry pi as a definition of an "old" machine? It's the
most popular low powered system. Which distribution would you use?

~~~
manaskarekar
Linaro and Raspbian both are based off LXDE if I recall correctly.

Wonder if they will also (have already?) adopt LXQt?

------
zmix
PR blurb, telling us, that Lubuntu is going to die within the next two years,
or so.

~~~
pseudonym2
You're downvoted a lot because you didn't substantiate your claim, but I
assume many people, myself included, agree with the sentiment.

Up until now Lubuntu had a clear goal: Create a usable Ubuntu-compatible
distribution that runs on old hardware.

Now the goals are so vague and subjective that they lead to nowhere. Sure,
this won't matter in the short term, but sooner or later the project will get
completely derailed because of different interpretations of this dumb
statement.

They can still make a good lightweight OS that runs on 10 year old hardware.
There's no reason to change the goal.

Sure, it's no longer a massive challenge, but it doesn't have to be. If the
developers want to try new things they can fork it.

------
sireat
I am a bit shocked because until now Lubuntu was awesome at serving the older
devices.

Lubuntu was working great on one of the first netbooks from 2007 where other
distributions out of the box were not.

If people want modular or super configurable then Arch Linux has that use case
pretty well covered does it not?

------
qwerty12345a
I use Lubuntu as my only OS on a Dell Latitude 5590 and I like the new
direction they pronounced in their site a few days ago. I have never seen
Lubuntu as a low end alternative, but as a capable OS that does not get into
my way. Lubuntu's panel works without glitches on the side of screen allowing
me use better the vertical screen size. The LXDE Lubuntu theme combined with
Faenza icons is also very nice looking. I am sure LXQt will keep up same
vision and the new direction matches my needs exactly. What I need is a smooth
upgrade path when time comes to move to LXQt and that it support the features
of LXDE I use now. I wish to LXQt and Lubuntu teams all the best to keep up
their good work and I am looking forward for the new software.

------
hyperpallium
Are low-end phones now on par with these 10 year old systems?

It's difficult to find a phone with less than 1 GB RAM. And although ARM CPUs
are much less powerful than x86 with the same clock, 1 GHz also seems a
mininum.

~~~
riquito
Nevermind arm/Intel, consider that the Intel processor of a notebook is way
less powerful than its desktop counterpart

------
yosefzeev
I used Lubuntu on some old systems. I would say the problem being faced by the
distro is not so much a matter of the focus, but the package management system
could have used some work. If they kept their mission statement and developed
something like the Aur in arch but obviously for older systems, I suspect they
would do quite well.

------
rocky1138
This makes sense for things like x86, but what about ARM stuff? It tends to be
low power in both wattage and speed, perfect for Lubuntu. I'd love to see even
more effort on things like the Pinebook.

------
known
I'm a Lubuntu user; I'll shift to
[https://clearlinux.org](https://clearlinux.org)

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megaman22
It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more
than capable of everything I throw at it. The upgrade cycle is essentially
dead.

That being said, I'm not clear on what the real difference between Lubuntu and
Kubuntu will be now.

~~~
EpicEng
>It won't be long until my primary gaming rig is ten years old, and it's more
than capable of everything I throw at it

You must not throw much at it

~~~
hug
I cannot think of a single AAA title in recent memory that causes my i7 2600k
-- an 8 year old CPU -- to struggle.

It can play absolutely every single modern game, with the only component
upgrade in its 8 year life being the GPU.

~~~
sincerely
I'm not a huge gamer anymore but...isn't the main bottleneck for running AAA
gaming at high settings the GPU?

~~~
nilkn
Generally yes, although there are certain games that an old CPU would
definitely choke on. It’s a bit disingenuous to say the upgrade cycle is dead
and then to spend more money on upgrading the GPU than the total value of
everything else combined.

