Lubuntu Artful Aardvark Final Beta (soon to be 17.10) has been released! Also in this release (in addition to the usual LXDE ISO) is an experimental image with LXQt instead of LXDE.

LXDE Edition

For the LXDE edition, we have a couple papercuts listed in the release notes, so please take a look there. This release features a new version of Audacious among other things, please try it out and report bugs if you find them.

Plans with LXQt

The (still, experimental) LXQt edition (Lubuntu Next) features some bugfixes from Debian based on the latest Qt. We plan on shipping Lubuntu Next alongside Lubuntu in the 17.10 release, featuring:

LXQt 0.11.1, including PCManFM-Qt, pavucontrol-qt, QTerminal, and many more applications in the LXQt suite

Qt 5.9.1

Qupzilla 2.1.2 (soon to be KDE Falkon, congrats to the Qupzilla team!)

LibreOffice 5.4.1

And so much more!

Here are the release notes if you would like to read them, they go into a bit more detail about the rough edges.

The LXQt 0.12 release is just beginning to be finalized upstream, but unfortunately the timing does not work out to ship this in Lubuntu Next 17.10. Don’t worry, we will have a plan to get the beautifully crafted LXQt 0.12 release out to our early adopters once it is finalized and uploaded to Debian. Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime, if you’re feeling a bit adventurous and you have a spare Lubuntu Next virtual machine somewhere and would like to try out the latest LXQt, we have created a PPA inspired by the Kubuntu Continuous Integration (KCI) Unstable PPA. Please be warned, this is raw from upstream, and there can and will be (occasional) breakage. All bugs need to go upstream, and please mention that you are using the daily Lubuntu Next PPA.

We would like to note that there are quite a bit of rough edges here, and would not recommend running this in production anywhere quite yet (we mean it!) as there’s still some things in store for the future. If you have any constructive criticisms or problems you would like to let us know about, please file a bug against Lubuntu Next or let us know by joining #lubuntu-devel on freenode or by joining our Telegram group (which is bridged to #lubuntu-devel).

Downloads

You can download the Lubuntu (LXDE) ISOs here.

You can download the Lubuntu Next (LXQt) ISOs here.

Please remember to verify the checksum for the ISO once you have downloaded it.

A big thanks to the whole Lubuntu team and contributors for helping pull this release together! If you would like to join our team and help make Lubuntu 17.10 the best release ever, feel free to get involved! Any contribution of your time, no matter how small or trivial, helps us out. We would especially like some help testing these milestones before they are released to help identify any bugs. If you are interested in helping with that, please subscribe to the lubuntu-devel mailing list and watch out for Calls for Testing, or join our IRC channel/Telegram group as linked above. It is as simple as installing Lubuntu as you normally would and marking it as “Passed” or “Failed” on the tracker. We look forward to getting some help with this!