Thursday, May 21, 2015

Lubuntu 15.04: A great lightweight distro, but needs to work on application support

Lubuntu is a very popular distro, especially for people looking to revive their older computers. In fact, my brother uses 14.04 LTS on his old IBM Thinkpad X32. Although the new 15.04 release is mostly full of minor improvements and bug fixes, I thought I’d review it as it will be the last LXDE-based release, as the team is getting ready for the shift to LXQt.


initial desktop.png




1. First impressions and ease of use


The live ISO is 690 MB and can be downloaded from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/vivid/release/. So we have a fairly standard LXDE desktop, simple but elegant, and it feels traditional, but not entirely out of place among today’s modern desktop environments.


menu.png


One thing that is fairly annoying is the lack of a search function in the menu, but only because I’m used to that. The feature would only be useful anyway if you had a lot of apps, but since Lubuntu’s target audience is owners of older computers who wouldn’t install many apps because of their underpowered hardware, this is mostly a non-issue.


Otherwise, Lubuntu’s default desktop is very reminiscent of Windows 9x.


Ease of use score: 9/10


2. Installer


Lubuntu uses the same Ubiquity installer as straight Ubuntu and most of its variants, which is in my opinion the best installer software in any Linux distro. So again, I’ll only leave some screenshots.


installer1.pnginstaller2.pnginstaller3.pnginstaller4.pnginstaller5.pnginstaller6.pnginstall.png


Installer score: 10/10



Release date
ISO size (GB)
Distribution base
Default filesystem
Install time
Boot time
Size of install
Desktop RAM use
Kernel Version
KaOS 2015.02
2/24/2015
1.4
Independent
XFS
18:03
0:36
4.6
415
3.18.7
Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1
2/25/2015
1.1
Ubuntu Vivid (15.04 Beta 1)
ext4
12:57
0:27
4.2
457
3.19.1
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce
2/6/2015
1.4
Arch
ext4
11:33
0:27
4.7
351
3.16.7
Netrunner 15
2/16/2015
1.9
Ubuntu Utopic (14.10)
ext4
16:20
0:41
6.4
714
3.16.0
openSUSE 13.2 KDE
11/4/2014
4.4
Independent
Btrfs (used ext4 because of known bug)
15:29
0:39
4.4
422
3.16.6
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0
2/17/2015
0.6
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
ext4
5:50
0:34
2.2
348
3.16.0
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon
11/29/2014
1.4
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
ext4
8:45
0:42
4.5
343
3.13.0
Pinguy OS 14.04.2
3/22/2015
2.6
Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS)
ext4
20:54
0:47
7.4
745
3.13.0
Korora 21 Cinnamon
2/6/2015
1.7
Fedora 21
ext4
13:24
1:04
5.0
602
3.18.3
Fedora 22 Beta
4/21/2015
1.3
Independent
ext4
10:10
0:46
4.2
843
4.0.0
Lubuntu 15.04
4/24/2015
0.7
Ubuntu Vivid (15.04)
ext4
11:55
0:22
2.4
216
3.19.0
Average of all distros

1.7


13:12
0:38
4.8
524



3. Design


As mentioned above, Lubuntu looks very current and not out of place, but it doesn’t adopt the flat design trend that many desktops, not necessarily just Linux distros, are. Personally, I think this would also help the lightweight nature of the distro.


compass.png


I also started to make some customizations. Above uses the Compass icon theme and Prime wallpaper by Nitrux. I also added a Plank and used the Numix window borders:


further customizations.png


Again, being GNOME based, you can pretty much use any theme you want, and customize away if you don’t like anything.


Design score: 9/10


4. Applications


Lubuntu adheres strictly to the “light applications only” rule.


Web Browser - Firefox
File Manager - PCManFM
Email Client - Sylpheed
Text Editor - Leafpad
Image Viewer - Image Viewer
Terminal Emulator - LXTerminal
Music Player - Audacious
Office Suite - Abiword+Gnumeric


Although the RAM usage is important, many of these apps are substandard. This is especially a problem considering that Firefox, no doubt a quality web browser, is heavy and something lighter could have been used, such as Midori. So I dock points for not leaning either towards only light applications or only quality applications.


Applications score: 7.5/10


5. Installing packages


Using the terminal, package installation is easy, using apt-get and a wide selection of apps in the default repositories, extendable through PPAs. However this is not newbie friendly, and there is a GUI tool available, Synaptic. However, this is not as easy to use as say, Ubuntu Software Center or Muon Discover. 

Thankfully, there is a category-based software center available (thanks to +elbachy88 for pointing this out). It's called Lubuntu Software Center and it's simple and intuitive to use. Sadly, I don't have a screenshot, but it's a joy and a pleasure to use.

 Installing packages score: 8.5/10

Final thoughts

Lubuntu is definitely a better choice than Bodhi for a light Linux distribution. However, as the most popular of its category, I would have expected its application selection and ease of use in installing packages to be better.

Final score: 44/50 = 88%


Distro name
Final Score
Manjaro 0.8.12 Xfce
99
Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1
97
Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon
95
Fedora 22 Beta
94
openSUSE 13.2 KDE
93
Korora 21 Cinnamon
92
Pinguy OS 14.04.2
91
Netrunner 15
90
Lubuntu 15.04
88
Bodhi Linux 3.0.0
84
KaOS 2015.02
80
Average of all reviews
91

2 comments:

  1. I think you miss Lubuntu Software Center, the distro has a newbie friendly installer

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Honestly I missed that. I'll go back and update it.

      Delete