Lubuntu just got worse

[rdh61]

Lubuntu just got worse. I hope developers keep an eye on these forums to glean some feedback. I would like to ask them, "Why did you take a nice, lightweight, functional system and make it bloated, complicated and buggy?" I refer of course to 20.04 LTS. I have to say that previously I had 18.04 LTS so I cannot say at exactly what point this change occurred. Next time I'll move to Mint with XFCE.

[Autodave]

Are you asking for help or just complaining? I really haven't seen other complaints about Lubuntu 20.04. Perhaps if you tell us what is going on, someone here may be able to help you!

[ajgreeny]

It's the move of DE that is the reason behind this.

Lxde used gtk2 toolkit but Lxqt uses qt5 I believe, much more up to date and flexible.

You could try Debian 10 and add the Lxde DE yourself as I did on an old netbook.

[rdh61]

@Autodave Thanks for your response. Just complaining actually! Or to be less facetious, just waving a flag at the developers, if they're watching. It is a general complaint. Lubuntu 20.04 is slow and comes with numerous things that don't work out of the box without hours of troubleshooting and tinkering. I've got it all working now, it's just slow. 18.04 was fast.

[rdh61]

@ajgreeny Thank you for your response and suggestion. I'll bear with it for now because I don't want the trouble of setting up a new system all over again right now. As said, I'll try Mint next time. I have it on another computer and it works really well.

[ajgreeny]

I'm running Lubuntu-20.04 as a VM in VirtualBox just to have a good look at it and so far I have to admit I really like it.

OK, it's very different from the 18.04 version because of the DE change, and I do accept that it might be a little bit heavier than the LXDE version you used previously but there comes a point when developers withdraw upkeep of distros that have a very small number of users, and little chance of keeping up to date, LXDE not having moved to gtk3, or not yet (see below).

As I understand the current situation it's the LXDE developers who have moved from that to LXQt, which uses the Qt toolkit in place of gtk2. There is some work on moving LXDE to gtk3 but it is happening slowly, I believe, and has not been without problems.
The Arch wiki reports at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LXDE#GTK_3_version

GTK 3 version
An experimental GTK 3 build of LXDE can be installed with the lxde-gtk3 group.
While it works mostly, there are some known issues with gpicview, lxappearance-obconf, lxlauncher and lxpanel.

You could, of course, use the minimal install CD version to install a cli version and then add LXDE as you own choice of desktop, or perhaps be even more radical and move to Debian 10, using the netinstall version and again choosing LXDE (and other packages) as you install; I have done that on a netbook from 2011 with Atom-N270 cpu and just 1G of ram. It works quite well for such a low powered macine, and a lot faster than Lubuntu 18.04 did.

NB:
I've just noticed that there is no 20.04 version of the minimal install CD so that may not be such a good idea, and I would suggest that the Debian 10 version would be the better choice.

[guiverc]

No, this is not a great place to be seen by Lubuntu developers.

PCman, the developer of `pcmanfm`, the file manager used by LXDE which also handles much of the desktop itself ported the GTK2 code to GTK3 and blogged on how much heavier GTK3 was on his own blog. His blog was (being a developer) rather technical and heavy.. but it's there. PCman then ported it to Qt5 and it was much lighter/faster... which eventually lead to many of the LXDE team joining with Razor-Qt team members on a new LXQt project.

I do testing of Ubuntu flavors, and still use x86 laptops (eg. IBM Thinkpad t43, pentium M & 1gb ram using Lubuntu 18.04 LTS), and used to use Ubuntu-MATE on that t43. However back ~16.04 when MATE moved from GTK2 to GTK3, I no longer wanted to use MATE on that laptop as it was too heavy for it (it was just slow). Xubuntu or XFCE (I also love) also slowed down as it ported from GTK2 to GTK3. XFCE didn't complete it's GTK3 move until 19.10 (not much fun on x86 anyway, but I had to try it!)

Lubuntu was the last to move from GTK2, and I feared how good it would be on my really old x86 boxes with 1GB of RAM; and I was pleasantly surprised. I'd seen MATE and then XFCE slow down as they moved to GTK3, but Lubuntu with LXQt was comparatively much faster & leaner (Lubuntu 18.10 & 19.04). I also use pentium-4 machines in testing, and it was very similar (I've only used all GTK3/19.10 Xubuntu on pentium 4; though I increased ram once x86 ISOs stopped being produced during 19.04 cycle; RAM being kept limited for testing purposes)

Yes on those limited systems (single core pentium M cpu, 1GB of ram) I'm careful with application choice, and the switch from GTK to Qt does require changing applications (unless you're willing to waste resources by having two libraries in memory that do the same thing, one for DE, one just for app which isn't a good idea with 1GB ram), changes I make for my own usage, thus did for testing purposes too.

I was very impressed with Lubuntu using LXQt on various single core pentium M & pentium 4 boxes in 18.10 & 19.04 (both of which are EOL now, so now 18.04 is the only supported release for x86).

Yes I tested the same on better hardware too, but I think Lubuntu did a really good job.

End-users maybe don't think about their application choice (thus use apps that don't share libraries used by desktop thus wasting memory/resources, destroying any leanness of their desktop, and could be better suited making a different desktop choice to begin with given their application choices (or having more than one desktop installed and selecting at login depending on what you want to do in that session; my used boxes have)).


(The effect of GTK2 to GTK3 move wasn't as apparent on c2d, c2q & better cpus, so maybe the results will vary on your CPU in use; it was most noticeable by me on the older single core pentium M cpus, or single/dual-core pentium 4s)

[DuckHook]

…NB:
I've just noticed that there is no 20.04 version of the minimal install CD so that may not be such a good idea, and I would suggest that the Debian 10 version would be the better choice.

It's still around, but buried in an obscure location that Canonical makes every effort to hide: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dis...mages/netboot/

I believe that they have committed to one more netboot image in 22.04 but not thereafter. Canonical wants to kill off the mini.iso.

[VMC]

Can you please list your hardware: CPU, RAM, HD, GRAPHICS.
I have a newer system, so I'm not experiencing your issue.
Also ask your questions here:
https://discourse.lubuntu.me/
As some council members hang out there.

[Chanath]

Have you tried Kubuntu 20.04 on your older machines?