My first Lubuntu install was in 2013, in a time of emergency - my laptop had died on me, and I needed a working PC immediately, so I dusted off an old 2003-vintage Celeron. That was Lubuntu way before the LXQT transition, and, while I didn’t pay much attention to it (I was under a deadline and needed to get my workflow back on track real fast), I was surprised by how stylized and pragmatic it was out of the box - and that was on a decade-old hardware, which wasn’t even supposed to be working any more. So I forged ahead, but made a mental note that Lubuntu was a really nice working environment, even on low-powered hardware.
Life went on, and, some six months later, I found myseld sitting on that same old Celeron PC, firing up Vim in a terminal, and finding my way out of a week-long writer’s block. Another note to self - a stripped down, no-frills environment can be very productive. People pay silly amounts of money for “distraction-free” editors and even devices, but a pared-down distro and an “upcycled” modest piece of kit could do the same job at zero cost.
Sometime last year, I dumpster-dived another ancient piece of kit - a Compaq Presario C700 laptop. Ok, I didn’t actually have to do any “diving” as such - someone had left it on the curb right next to the rubbish bins, together with its power cord. Big, chunky, sandwich-width laptop, from back when people found these things aesthetically pleasing. A very nice, large 15" screen, a very decent keyboard, but very, very weak hardware: a Celeron N100, 64-bit but still a single-core CPU, and only 1 (one) GB of RAM. I beefed up the RAM up to 4GB (DDR2!!!), and installed Lubuntu 24.04 LTS on it. And, heck, Lubuntu has definitely come a long way. I just love the LXQT environment, all convention-over-configuration, “stay out of your way and let you work” philosophy, and, even though Lubuntu is no longer focused on low-end hardware, still amazingly fast on this hardware. Of course, 1200-tab Firefox sessions are best attempted on other devices, but, as was the case a decade ago, this measly laptop became my distraction-free, no-multitasking-please-we’re-on-an-n100 writing environment (usually, in GNU Emacs, but LibreOffice is also at hand). And I find I use it almost daily.
What’s amazing about the current Lubuntu is how much power it packs under the hood - a full Ubuntu install, no less. I’ve got Texlive, pandoc, and the Nextcloud client synched to my home (Ubuntu) server, as well as an army of other utilities there for anything text- or document-related, and Inkscape and Gimp work fine as long as I remember the no-multitasking rule - although I find graphical work is usually best done on one of my other, more “contemporary” Ubuntu machines.
I’ve got the feeling that, going forward, I’m always going to have a Lubuntu machine in my set-up.
