Here is the seventh issue of This Week in Lubuntu Development. You can read the last issue here.

Changes

General

This week was focused on polishing the installer experience and the desktop in general. Here are the changes made, with links to the full details.

Lubuntu Artwork

Lubuntu Seed

Calamares settings

Desktop Experience

Miscellaneous

Our Lubuntu metapackage is now in Git.

When starting the ISO, it now says “Start Lubuntu” instead of “Try Lubuntu without installing” / “Install Lubuntu”.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

Stable Releases (Lubuntu Classic)

GtkTreeView separators garbled display with Lubuntu default theme was fixed and uploaded to the queue. Here are the packaging changes. Please help test!

Help us test LTS to LTS upgrades! We are looking for help in testing and filing bugs to fix before the 18.04.1 release on July 26th.

Bugs

Incoming / Fix needed

Marked as invalid/duplicate

Solved

Want to help?

One of the easiest ways to get involved with Lubuntu and help us make this release the best one yet is to test Lubuntu and report bugs.

You can learn how to write an excellent bug report that helps us solve your issue quicker by reading this guide.

More information about testing on Lubuntu can be found here.

Infrastructure and Project Changes

Phabricator

We now take advantage of the calendar on our Phabricator instance.

Translations

We now have a Weblate instance!

Right now there are not many strings to translate, but as time goes on, we will add more.

Do you speak a language that isn’t available to translate there? Let us know in the comments or elsewhere and we will add that language.

Please note: if you are a registered user, you will be able to contribute translations with only one stop gap, but if you are contributing anonymously, there’s quite a bit more work involved for us. So please do try and get an account there, so we can give you credit for your hard work. 🙂

Here are the translators who have contributed so far:

Henrik Christiansen (Danish)

Hans P. Möller (German, Spanish)

Daniel Absmeier (German)

Luís Rafael Gomes (Portuguese)

Lucas A. V. Dantas (Portuguese (Brazil))

Marcin Mikołajczak (Polish)

Tony Cuesta Escobar (Catalan)

Thank you for your valuable contributions!

State of i386 Images Going Forward

Lubuntu has, for the entirety of its lifetime, supported the i386 architecture (commonly referred to as 32-bit). But, as hardware is becoming newer, we are starting to have a hard time maintaining i386 going forward, as the machines are becoming rare. We understand that there is still interest for keeping the i386 images for Lubuntu, and thus, have not dropped it like the majority of other Ubuntu flavors have.

However, when we stop receiving adequate testing on the ISO QA tracker for i386, especially before a milestone or release, we believe this indicates the end of user interest for supporting it. As such, we will only continue to support these images if there is adequate testing for them, and they will no longer be a release blocker if the images are not tested (they will not be released in that case, and will not receive further releases).

So, if you have i386 machines that you are still using Lubuntu on, please help us test, or the images will no longer be released.

Furthermore, we will need help fixing i386-specific bugs should they arise. If more than a few i386-specific bugs go unfixed as well, including any release-blocking bugs, the images will no longer be released.

Roadmap

You can find the Cosmic Cuttlefish release cycle here.

You can stop expecting features on August 23, 2018 when Feature Freeze is put into effect. The beta is slotted for September 27, 2018 and the final release date for October 18, 2018.

Here are some major, Lubuntu-specific features you can expect before the release:

The beginnings of a welcome center (more details to come).

Calamares polish, including an additional module for more packages to be installed.

A plan for replacing Openbox, the current window manager used in Lubuntu.

Our artwork team is still working on Lenny, and we’ll let you know when we have Lenny Cuttlefish. 🙂

In the Press

This section is for highlighting exceptional Lubuntu coverage since the last issue.

Did you find any other exceptional stories about Lubuntu? Let us know and we’ll be happy to include them here.

Contact us

Feel free to get in touch with us here for support, and for press/marketing purposes or if you have a private inquiry, you can get in touch with Release Manager Simon Quigley here.