Lubuntu Council Elections 2026

[arraybolt3]

I’m pleased to announce the 2026 Lubuntu election cycle.

What is the Lubuntu Council?

The Lubuntu Council is the governing board for Lubuntu. Defined by our constitution, the Lubuntu Council reports directly to the Ubuntu Community Council, and is given the following responsibilities:

• Mediate disputes within the community (as defined above) that cannot be resolved by themselves, or cannot be resolved peacefully.
• Appoint team members to positions temporarily if a position being held becomes vacant, and until a new leader can be chosen.
• Delegate administration of community groups to individuals which report directly to the Council. These delegated administrators should be the clear leaders of these groups already, to keep the spirit of democratic meritocracy.
• Grant Lubuntu Membership to individuals within the Lubuntu project who have made significant and sustained contributions.

How do I apply?

You must be an official member of the Lubuntu project. Please create a reply to this Discourse post with your platform. This may/could include:

• Why do you want to be a member of the Lubuntu Council?
• What value do you see in the Lubuntu project, and where do you see it going from here?
• If you could wave a magic wand, what would you change about the Lubuntu project?
  Publicly, the Lubuntu Council’s primary goal is to keep the gears moving in Lubuntu, and ensure our contributors feel valued. As explicitly written in the Lubuntu Constitution:

It is the duty of the Council to ensure the health of the community.

That is most of what this work entails.

Timeline

2026-06-05 (time of posting) to 2026-06-19 (00:00 UTC): Nomination period
2026-06-19 (00:00 UTC) to 2026-06-20 (00:00 UTC): The Lubuntu Council will compile the nominations into a CIVS poll and make it available to Lubuntu Members.
2026-06-21 (00:00 UTC) to 2026-06-28 (00:00 UTC): Voting period
2026-06-30: Expiration date for current members, new members will expire on 2027-06-30.

Questions?

Please contact the Lubuntu Council directly.

[teward]

My name is Thomas Ward, and I am nominating myself for re-election as a member of the Lubuntu Council.

A lot of times you don’t see me ‘doing much’ in the forefront of the Lubuntu side of things, but since 2021 when I was elected, I’ve been the Lubuntu Team Lead, handling a lot of the executive operations and financial operations side of things. To that end, my primary role has been to be the “on paper” contact for the Lubuntu Association who cuts checks for the infrastructure payments (full disclosure, Lubuntu Association since before my election in 2021 has paid my consulting LLC to operate as an MSP to operate the bulk of the Lubuntu infrastructure - git, our discourse before we made it here, development sandbox systems, etc.), represent Lubuntu and its Council on legal operations and proceedings, etc.

Since 2025, however, I have also been working to pioneer things for Ubuntu Flavors in general. Including working with Canonical IS, Canonical Legal, the Canonical Community Team, and other flavors to help spearhead the efforts to allow flavors to have more direct control over their respective domains. To that end, in early 2026, both Lubuntu and the Ubuntu Studio flavors were given control of the DNS for their respective domains, lessening the requirements on Canonical IS to operate for simple (and often times annoyingly trivial) DNS configurations for their domains. This has allowed us in Lubuntu, courtesy of me and my focused drive, to upgrade and maintain the Lubuntu “Infrastack” as I call it with less need to rely on Canonical to make changes to make things live. This means more rapid evolution of Lubuntu’s stack for developer needs. Additionally, it also makes a far more rapid evolution of the security surrounding Lubuntu and the sites it works with - all the lubuntu.me environment (except the main base domain and site - working on that!) is now shielded with Cloudflare controls to help protect against DDoS and bot traffic, reducing the impact on the underlying infrastructure. (This was done as a result of knowing that Ubuntu came under the DDoS - tangentially we were also hit but thanks to the infrastructure sitting in OVH datacenters, OVH DDoS protection shielded us from the brunt of any traffic bursts. Now, Cloudflare is an extra protective layer as well!)

As Team Lead, I also reserve the “Big Red Button” to veto lower teams in the Lubuntu side of things or make executive decisions when other teams’ members (such as Release Managers, etc.) are otherwise unavailable. I know the various teams are all more than capable (Development, Documentation / Manual writing, community management, etc.) and therefore I usually don’t have to do that much in the foreground for Lubuntu, though my name shows up as a council member. However, I rely heavily on delegating powers and permissions to the various groups and teams that are part of Lubuntu and led by other members of the Council so that the “team lead” doesn’t have to take on every role and action.

If reelected I will continue to be the Team Lead, and continue to keep Lubuntu solvent and operational, and make sure the teams are doing what they do currently. As I said, my name shows up regularly within Lubuntu, but the vast majority of the day-to-day work is done by the sub-teams who continue to display top tier capabilities and capacity to keep things operational. In the business world, the “top person” delegates the responsibilities to the subordinate groups, and Lubuntu operates this way with the subordinate teams having quite the autonomy to make decisions without everything running past me, as the people running those teams know their stuff extremely well and have my trust.

---

Now, onto my wider information.

Within Ubuntu, I have a number of hats:

• Community Council Member
• Technical Board Member
• Ubuntu Core Developer (basically full upload privs)
• Ubuntu Backporters Member (we handle the -backports pockets!)
• Community-contributor to the Server Team
• Ask Ubuntu Moderator and community volunteer.

Outside of Ubuntu I also do the following:

• Debian Maintainer for several packages
• Member of the Debian Python Team (working on code there!)
• Member of the Debian Privacy Team (helping maintain bits of Tor stuff!)

I am an active/supporting member of Codeberg e.V., a non-profit organization out of Germany that specialize in open-source software development services including fully free static page hosting, VCS repository hosting, etc. with a focus on supporting the open-source community with truly open-source free products for open source projects.

I am a Certified Information Systems Security Processional (CISSP), actively working on my ISSAP (Information Systems Security Architecture Professional) certification.

I am a Python programmer in my spare time, as well as a network security expert and recognized Linux systems administrator.

---

I hope that everyone will be understanding with my desire to continue to support Lubuntu, and even if I am not on the Council, the Lubuntu infrastructure isn’t going away any time soon.

[roberalz]

Hello, I would like to nominate myself for Lubuntu Council.

I am running for re-election to the Lubuntu Council. I have used Lubuntu intermittently since the days of the LXDE desktop, but when I learned about the transition to LXQt, I began actively contributing support during this change and have continued to do so to this day.

My main role is to support non-English-speaking communities. Most of the time, I work behind the scenes, dedicating myself to translating LXQt into Galician, Spanish, and Basque.

My goal is to strengthen the ties between the different flavors and communities of Lubuntu.

[arraybolt3]

I would like to nominate myself for Lubuntu Council.

I am currently the Lubuntu Release Manager, deciding when our ISO is in a good enough shape to release for beta and final release milestones. I’m also our primary package uploader and will probably continue to be for the Stonking release cycle. Over most of 2025 and the beginning of 2026, I was Lubuntu’s primary developer and packager as well, although I have been doing less of that lately thanks to lots of help from Simon Quigley I have been a Lubuntu Council member for two years prior.

If re-elected, I intend on continuing to help us with regular maintenance tasks like membership renewal and general governance tasks when they pop up. Whether re-elected or not, I will continue to help with package maintenance and uploading as my schedule allows.

[leok]

I would like to nominate myself for Lubuntu Council.

I have been using Lubuntu the past 10 years or so. I have been a Lubuntu member since 2020. I also was a member of the Lubuntu council a few years ago.

My main role in Lubuntu has been ISO testing throughout the release cycles and anything else that needs to be tested.

I am very interested in the idea of “Context-Aware Desktop” while retaining the core functions of a very good operating system.

[guiverc]

I’m Chris Guiver, and am nominating myself for election as a member of the Lubuntu Council.

Launchpad ID : Chris Guiver in Launchpad

I’ve been on the Lubuntu Council before, but am most active now with the Ubuntu News team, Ubuntu Discourse and involve myself in other teams as time allows.

I’m not a developer, and thus was useful [historically] more in helping with wallpaper competitions, the Lubuntu Discourse (now an area on Ubuntu Discourse), reviewing or pasting release & other notices etc, and I’ll do this even if not on Lubuntu Council. I also did lots of Quality Assurance testing in the past too, but as that link shows we have another star in that area .

Alas my time is more limited than in the past (as such my Quality Assurance testing is way down in recent cycle(s)). As the Lubuntu members should already be aware, I’m spending a lot of time recently helping with family, so I’m not an ideal candidate as I see it. If we need another body on a seat for voting, I’m offering myself as available, as I want the project to remain healthy.

_{[ One of my links may not show for everyone, but many will see what it shows (as proof), but it’s not critical ]}

[arraybolt3]

Due to an extremely hectic Friday and a Saturday spent recovering, I unfortunately missed the time to create the CIVS poll by quite a lot. Very sorry for this, I have the poll out now though.

[arraybolt3]

@Sudodus I tried adding your lubuntu.me address to the CIVS poll, but it didn’t work. Could you DM me the email address I should use for you to access the poll?

[arraybolt3]

The voting period has ended and the results are in:

1. Aaron Rainbolt (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)
2. Thomas Ward loses to Aaron Rainbolt by 3–2
3. Leo Kolbeinsson loses to Aaron Rainbolt by 4–1, loses to Thomas Ward by 3–2
4. Roberalz loses to Aaron Rainbolt by 5–0, loses to Leo Kolbeinsson by 3–2
5. Chris Guiver loses to Aaron Rainbolt by 4–1, loses to Roberalz by 3–2
6. No further candidates loses to Aaron Rainbolt by 6–0, loses to Chris Guiver by 6–0

New members will be added to the Lubuntu Council team and re-elected members will have their membership renewed. Thanks to all who nominated themselves, and to our members for voting