Lubuntu 22.04: Almost perfect

 Keywords: "Lubuntu 22.04 review"
Other than sluggish responses to password-inputs during booting, a bug (probably already fixed by some upgrade) which hinders the opening of encrypted flash-drives which are plugged in after the system is booted, and a slow first Firefox Snap launch during each session (although after loading, it's amazing), Lubuntu 22.04 quickly became one of my favorites, along with MX-Linux XFCE (and KDE), Ubuntu Mate, and Kubuntu (I'm partial to Debian/APT-based distros, due to APT-offline). (MX-Linux with the LXQT desktop would be a great combination.) Lubuntu 22.10, which will have a more mature version of the LXQT desktop environment, will undoubtedly be fantastic. You can install LXQT 1.1 (the latest as of this writing), but it's from a PPA, not the Ubuntu repository. I've read that it's excellent, however.

Lubuntu 22.04's selection of software is probably the most functional I've seen, without a lot of niche apps. For example, I almost always install Disks (gnome-disk-utility) when I create an installation, but Lubuntu includes the KDE Partition Manager, which does everything that Disks does. It also includes the Muon package manager, which is a lot like Synaptic, and a software-sources-management app like Software & Updates (i.e. software-properties-gtk) in addition to the Discover app-store.

The file manager, PCManFM-Qt is a sort of combination of Thunar and Dolphin, and is powerful and easy to use. It can be configured to open files and folders with one click, and has a button to open a tab as a root instance, although the administrative password is still required.

Lubuntu 22.04 includes Noble Notes, which is very functional although somewhat cumbersome compared to desktop-notes apps and widgets. I believe I read that an LXQT notes-widget is in the works - hopefully it will be like XFCE's notes-widget.

To add an app to a panel, you would just drag its icon from the main menu to a "Quick Launch" widget/area in the panel.

I had a "package cannot be authenticated" problem when trying to install software after performing an update via APT-offline, but I performed it again (60MB download each time using APT-offline, and 30MB when using a direct connection, which is small for a package-index update compared to most I've seen lately), and the problem went away. I'm not sure exactly what caused the problem, but I suspect that the first time, I didn't give the APT-offline get-op (a specialized download/screening process) sufficient time to write the package-index files from DRAM (apparently used as a transit point to maximize the download-rate) to the flash-drive installation which I had designated as the storage-location, because for one thing after installing those package index files, there was no InRelease file among the resulting packages lists, although there was an InRelease file among the package lists after installing the 2nd batch of package-index files. (It didn't occur to me to compare the two sets of package-index files themselves until after I had deleted the first set.)

The installer (Calamares) apparently couldn't create an installation on a flash drive which already contained an installation (perhaps as a safety measure), so I had to format the drives which I decided to use for Lubuntu installations before I could perform an installation on them with this installer. I prefer Kingston USB3 Datatravelers (a 32GB is probably optimal) because the installation-process isn't glacial, the resulting installation is sufficiently responsive, and the KDT-USB3 drives which I've used run cool compared to most USB3 drives I've tried.

Lubuntu 22.04 is definitely a worthy member of the Ubuntu family, although you might want to wait for the next point-release if you don't want to perform an upgrade to get rid of some bugs, or if you want a more mature version of the desktop without installing it from a PPA. However, you might have to get 22.10 for the upgraded desktop.