Lubuntu 18.10 will officially switch from LXDE to LXQt

After transitioning from the GTK-based LXDE desktop environment to the modern LXQt desktop environment supported by Qt 5, Lubuntu 18.10 will be the first version to be officially ported to the LXQt desktop.

Walter Lapchynski of the Lubuntu project has confirmed that for Ubuntu 18.10 “Cosmic Cuttlefish”, they will switch to using the LXQt desktop environment.

Simon Quigley of Lubuntu stated why there are several reasons for switching, but mainly because the development speed of upstream LXDE has slowed down significantly, and most desktop environments are based on GTK 2 and it is losing support and will eventually be eliminated. On the one hand, upstream LXQt development is quite active. It is based on the Qt 5 framework and is more stable than GTK (does not depend on GNOME).

Simon Quigley also mentioned that it took so long to switch because of a lack of team resources and that the technology is not yet in place.