This review is far in the past so out of date as Lubuntu has advanced a lot, but I'm leaving it here for posterity.
Lubuntu has joined the *buntu stable of distros and is supposed to be able to use lower spec machines. I have experience with other LXDE based distros like Mint-LXDE and openSUSE-LXDE, and Crunchbang, which isn't actually LXDE but uses openbox. That last I've found quite good on low-memory netbooks. I decided to give Lubuntu a go.
My test hardware was a 400MHz Celeron with 256MB RAM, 6GB hard disk and a 1024x768 screen. I burned a CD-RW and booted with it. It brings up the familiar splash screen and a language chooser on top of it. I picked Install to hard disk right away since I wanted to see what it was like booting for real from a hard disk. First problem, various text error messages to the screen. Second problem, this one serious, it took ages reading the CD to start up a live GUI session with an icon to do the install. That's kind of self-defeating. If you have a low-resource machine, you don't want the user grow much older waiting for the installer to start. Why not go straight into a minimal X installer? The live installer went through the standard 7-step Ubuntu setup rather sluggishly but finished fine. On rebooting from the hard disk it came up with an openbox desktop which worked ok, considering the speed of the CPU. I note that Chromium is the promoted browser. RAM footprint wasn't too bad, free showed something like 128MB actually used.
Overall it feels like it was rushed out to take advantage of 10.04 LTS release publicity. Note, Lubuntu 10.04 is not a LTS release. So a pass for Lubuntu 10.04 from me, but "can do better" next term.
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