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Lubuntu 18.10 was a landmark release for this Ubuntu flavor. Since its first release in 2010, Lubuntu has been a showcase for the LXDE desktop, but with the 18 October, 2018 release of 18.10, it moved to the new LXQt desktop.
History
The LXDE desktop traces its origins back to 2006, when Taiwanese computer programmer Hong Jen Yee released a new file manager. Hong’s user name is PCMan, so he named the new file manager, PCMan File Manager or PCManFM for short. The new file manager was well received and the idea quickly grew to build a new, lightweight Linux desktop around it. This became LXDE, the Lightweight X-11 Desktop Environment. LXDE is written in the C programming language, uses the GTK+ 2 toolkit, and sports a distinctive stylized swallow logo.
Lubuntu, featuring LXDE, first arrived in April 2010 as 10.04, and quickly gained a following among users. Its single menu was easy to use and it had low RAM and CPU requirements, running well on older hardware and very fast on newer equipment. The LXDE desktop was incrementally refined over time and PCManFM was completely rewritten in 2010. Lubuntu became an official Ubuntu flavor on 11 May, 2011.
Hong was not happy when the GTK3 toolkit came along and he decided to experiment with rewriting PCManFM using the Qt toolkit in the C++ language instead in 2013. He wrote, “working with Qt/C++ is much more pleasant and productive than messing with C/Gobject/GTK+. Since GTK+ 3 breaks backward compatibility a lot and it becomes more memory hungry and slower, I don’t see much advantage of GTK+ now. GTK+ 2 is lighter, but it’s no longer true for GTK+ 3. Ironically, fixing all of the broken compatibility is even harder than porting to Qt in some cases (PCManFM IMO is one of them).” He released his first version of PCManFM-Qt on 26 March, 2013.
Hong immediately got questions as to whether LXDE would switch to being Qt-based. He wrote in a blog post, “No, LXDE will NOT use Qt. Don’t panic!! It’s just one of my side projects and was an experiment to test how good libfm and Qt are.”
Instead of moving LXDE to the Qt toolkit on 3 July, 2013, Hong announced a new port of the LXDE desktop using Qt, instead, initially called LXDE-Qt. The only complication was that there already was a project working on producing a new lightweight Qt-based desktop, called Razor-qt, with a rotary “pizza” cutter as its logo. The two communities of developers found common ground and decided to merge their efforts. The new combined project was named LXQt and got a new hummingbird logo.
One of the stated aims of LXQt is to eventually replace LXDE and so LXDE went into “maintenance status”, getting bugs fixed, but not adding new features.
LXQt in Lubuntu
It was originally intended to introduce LXQt into Lubuntu with the 14.10 release, but more work was needed. Lubuntu releases through 2015-2018 all were initially announced as hoping to move to LXQt, but the implementation was consistently delayed to get all the parts working right. During this period the Lubuntu users had many solid LXDE-based releases, all offering great stability and no new learning curve. These included two Long Term Support (LTS) releases, 16.04 and 18.04. Finally LXQt landed in Lubuntu 18.10.
The Lubuntu developers’ aims changed with the new desktop’s introduction, too, as developer Simon Quigley explained on 27 July, 2018, “Lubuntu will stay light, and for users with old systems, should still be usable. But we will no longer provide minimum system requirements and we will no longer primarily focus on older hardware.”
LXQt Arrives In Lubuntu
With four years of lead-up to the introduction of LXQt, there was a great deal of anticipation in the Lubuntu community. Of course this was not the first time that an Ubuntu flavor had changed its user interface. Kubuntu had made the move from the K Desktop Environment 3 to the KDE Plasma Desktop in 8.04. Ubuntu itself changed from GNOME 2 and its three menu system, to Unity and its desktop launcher in 10.10/11.04 and then to GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell) with 17.10.
Booting up Lubuntu 18.10 and touring through it shows a lot of careful work done. The new user experience is smooth and feels quite slick. Much of LXQt works just like LXDE, all from a single menu on the bottom panel (which can be moved). The menus are now more complex, though, but offer a high degree of customization to give Lubuntu the look and feel you want.
The file manager, PCManFM-Qt, is where this all started. Opening it shows that it looks a bit different under Qt. It works differently too, with different menus and preferences. Mostly it gives equivalent functionality, although some previous specific features are missing. For instance there are no keyboard shortcuts for views, although these can be selected from the “view” menu.
It isn’t just the core components that have been re-written using Qt, either. You would expect the menus, panel, customization interfaces, and, of course, the file manager, to look new and they all do, but the Lubuntu developers have done their best to provide a full suite of Qt-based default applications as well and that means the whole user experience has changed. Some of the newly-introduced applications come from KDE, which is also Qt-based.
New Qt applications to Lubuntu include the VLC media player, Quassel internet relay chat , FeatherPad text editor, Skanlite scanning application, Trojitá email client, and the K3B CD/DVD burning application, which comes from KDE. LibreOffice replaces the former AbiWord and Gnumeric office applications, although this is the Qt-based LibreOffice port, rather than the more commonly seen GTK version.
There are still some GTK-based applications. The developers had hoped to have a Qt web browser and Falkon looked very promising, but didn’t quite make the cut. Falkon, formerly QupZilla, is an excellent browser, with lots of potential, but, for now, the GTK-based Firefox remains the default browser in an otherwise Qt environment. It is worth noting that GTK-based applications can still be run alongside Qt applications in Lubuntu, they just look a bit different than Qt applications, with things like menu font renderings the most noticeable.
In testing Lubuntu 18.10 on my eight-year old System76 laptop I did find a few bugs, such as “tap to click” not working on my touchpad and a lack of spell checking available in LibreOffice. There were also some networking and screen-locking issues that seem to be common in several 18.10 Ubuntu flavors and thus probably not Lubuntu or LXQt-specific.
Overall LXQt, as seen in Lubuntu 18.10, is ready for day-to-day use, while there is also still room for ongoing refinement. Introducing LXQt in Lubuntu 18.10 was a careful choice by the Lubuntu developers. Coming right after Lubuntu 18.04 LTS, the final LXDE release, it gives developers three “standard” releases to continue to polish LXQt before the first LTS release, which will be 20.04 LTS, due out in April 2020. Until then, many of us will continue to use Lubuntu 18.04 LTS and test the new LXQt versions as they come out.