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Review – Lubuntu 25.04

by Adam Hunt

Even though I use Ubuntu Cinnamon these days, I did use Lubuntu over a period of 12 years, from 10.10 to 22.04 LTS, and every time I boot it up it feels like coming home for a visit again.

Lubuntu 25.10 came out on 17 April 2025, the same day as all the other Ubuntu flavors. It is the middle of three interim releases and comes with nine months of support, until January 2026. This development cycle is working towards the next long term support version (LTS), which will be Lubuntu 26.04 LTS, scheduled for April 2026.

Lubuntu 25.04 marks the 14th release with the LXQt desktop, the 28th since Lubuntu became an official Ubuntu "flavor", and the 31st overall Lubuntu release since that very first one, Lubuntu 10.04. Once again, the official release announcement does not take credit for the first three Lubuntu releases prior to it becoming an official flavor, but some of us are old enough to have been using it back then! I actually ran Lubuntu 10.10.

According to the official release announcement, the developers state that "our focus this release can be put quite simply: stabilize, refine, and refresh." They also noted that they would "port as much software as reasonable from Qt 5 to Qt 6" and also "get Lubuntu fully prepared for Wayland". These do sound like laudable goals.

Installation

I downloaded Lubuntu 25.04 via BitTorrent, using Transmission, from the official source. As always, I did a command line SHA256 sum check, just to make sure it was a good download. I dropped it into a USB stick equipped with Ventoy 1.1.05 and it booted up perfectly. This was as expected, given that Lubuntu is officially listed as supported by Ventoy.

The Lubuntu 25.04 ISO file was 3.3 GB to download, which is 6% smaller than the previous version, Lubuntu 24.10, which was 3.5 GB.

System requirements

Since the release of Lubuntu 18.10, the project announced that it would no longer publish any minimum system requirements.

New

This release uses the LXQt 2.1.0 desktop and the latest Qt toolkit, version 6.8.3. The project has bumped up the toolkit version in an attempt to improve stability.

There is an updated version of the Calamares installer to version 3.3.14. The installer provides fewer options than the last version used in Lubuntu 24.10 due to issues with the “additional options” and third-party packages. This move was necessary due to issues found, but the team committed to coordinating getting a fixed version out soon in a new Lubuntu 25.04.1 version, or at least as a personal package archive (PPA).

The developers have also changed the way the Lubuntu minimal installation works. In the past, it ran a full installation and then used an automated script using APT to remove the non-desired packages. As can be imagined, that resulted in a slower installation process. This has now been changed to a separate installation squashfs file instead. It is worth noting that the minimal installation does not include snapd to enable Snap packages.

This release does introduce the LXQt Fancy Menu which is a redesigned version of the previous menu system. Because it goes only one level deep, it has a slightly different organization to the last menu used. It does include application searching.

"Not new" in this release is the display server used, which remains as X11 rather than a Wayland-based one. The last release, Lubuntu 24.10, and this one, were each intended to include Wayland support, but it did not happen. The developers indicated that they prioritized stability and decided to hold Wayland until the next release, writing “this is the last time we are delaying this." The intention is that the next release, Lubuntu 25.10, will use Miriway as its default Wayland compositor, backed by the .deb-based Mir 2.20. If for some reason that slips again, that would leave the LTS to introduce Miriway instead, something I am sure the developers would really want to avoid, as an LTS release is almost never the place to bring in something this big and new. The Lubuntu developers are working with the LXQt desktop team to make sure that Miriway is going to work right from the start. There is even one developer who is both working on Lubuntu and LXQt, which should be an advantage.

The Lubuntu developers also note that their default media player, VLC, has still not been updated to the Qt 6 toolkit, which needs to happen for Wayland compatibility, and also to finish removing the last vestiges of Qt 5 from the distribution. It is expected that the upcoming VLC 4.0 will be based on Qt 6. If the VLC developers do not get that new version completed in time, the Lubuntu team have noted that the distribution may have to remove VLC and ship with a different media player.

Like all of the Ubuntu 25.04 family of releases, Lubuntu uses Linux kernel 6.14 and systemd 257.4 as the initialization system. Lubuntu has been using systemd since 15.04 so this is the 21st release over ten years using it with no issues.

There also has been work done improving translation support for languages other than English on Lubuntu.

One thing that is new in Lubuntu 25.04, and not at all welcome, is that the live session will not mount drives, just like Ubuntu Cinnamon 25.04 and Xubuntu 25.04. As with those other distributions, this makes it pretty useless as a rescue disk and also makes doing screenshots and getting them out of the live session more difficult.

Settings

Lubuntu 25.04 is code named "Plucky Puffin" and so it comes with a new puffin-themed default wallpaper and this may well be the nicest Plucky Puffin wallpaper in the Ubuntu universe. There are 21 wallpapers provided including the new, simple and elegant SDDM Ocean, the classic Lubuntu Friends-dark, plus many Lubuntu wallpapers from recent releases.

Other settings include 19 window themes, 11 icon themes, 15 LXQt themes, two cursor themes, nine GTK3 and six GTK2 themes, providing a good range of user customization.

Applications

Some of the applications included with Lubuntu 25.04 are:
2048-qt 0.1.6 simple lightweight game*
Blueman 2.4.4 bluetooth connector
Discover Software Center 6.3.4 package management system
FeatherPad 1.6.0 text editor
Firefox 137.0.2 web browser**
KDE partition manager 24.12.3 partition manager
LibreOffice 22.2.2.2 office suite, Qt interface version
Lubuntu Update 1.1.1 software update notifier
LXimage-Qt 2.1.1 image viewer
LXQt Archiver 1.1.0 archive manager
Noblenote 1.4.0 note taker
PCManFM-Qt 2.1.0 file manager
PipeWire 1.2.7 audio controller
Qalculate! 5.5.1 calculator
qPDFview 0.5.0 PDF viewer*
Qlipper 5.1.2 clipboard manager*
QTerminal 2.1.0 terminal emulator
Qtransmission 4.0.6 BitTorrent client, Qt interface version*
ScreenGrab 2.9.0 screenshot tool
Skanlite 24.12.3 scanning utility
Startup Disk Creator 0.4.1 (usb-creator-kde) USB boot disk maker
Systemd 257.4 init system
VLC 3.0.21 media player*
Wget 1.24.5 command line webpage downloader*
XScreenSaver 6.08 screensaver and screen locker*

* Indicates the same version as used in Lubuntu 24.10.
** supplied as a Snap, so version depends on the upstream package manager.

One of the advantages of reviewing Lubuntu is that the release announcement typically tends to have a lot of information. Unfortunately in this case, while it has a lot to say, it misses some important details, like which default applications have been added and removed.

Lubuntu 25.04 removes the ImageMagick command line image editor and also the Quassel IRC client (Internet Relay Chat) . I am not sure that there was a good user case for including ImageMagick in the first place. As far as IRC clients go, the use of IRC seems to have peaked almost 20 years ago and is not now in widespread use, if indeed it ever was. An IRC client can always be added from the repositories, if desired.

The Kcalc desktop calculator from KDE has been swapped out for Qalculate! 5.5.1.

As in the past, the indispensable LibreOffice 25.2.2.2 office suite is supplied complete, less only LibreOffice Base, the office suite's database application. Base is probably the least used component of the suite and can be added from the repositories, if needed.

Lubuntu 25.04 does not come with an email client, image editor, video editor or web cam application, although there are good choices for these in the repositories.

Conclusions

Lubuntu 25.04 is a good, solid release with very little new beyond nice wallpaper and a small application shuffle. The full implementation of Qt 6 and Wayland remains a future goal, hopefully for Lubuntu 25.10.

We’ll check up on Lubuntu 25.10 in October and see if those items can be checked off as completed in that final interim release of this cycle, and also look ahead to what may be in store for the next LTS version, Lubuntu 26.04 LTS, due out in April 2026.

External links

Official website: https://lubuntu.me/

Biography:

Adam Hunt started using Ubuntu in 2007. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in a house with no Windows.