October 22 was a big day for Ubuntu users as Canonical unveiled the new major release of the world's most popular free operating system, Ubuntu Linux, including most of its derivatives, such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, and Ubuntu GNOME.
In this article, we will take a closer look at the Lubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) distribution, an official flavor of Ubuntu built around the lightweight LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) desktop environment. Unfortunately, Lubuntu 15.10 remains based on LXDE, as the distribution's maintainers consider the next-gen LXQt desktop environment an unfinished product.
Therefore, they tagged Lubuntu 15.10 as a bugfix release, and started to prepare the operating system for the transition to the LXQt desktop environment, which should happen during the development cycle for Lubuntu 16.04, which at the moment of writing this article we have no idea if it will be an LTS (Long Term Support) release or not, like Ubuntu 16.04 is.
What's new in Lubuntu 15.10
Being a bugfix release and all that, Lubuntu 15.10 updates many LXDE components, replaces the buggy iBus input method framework with the more reliable Fcitx, which also triggered changes to the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese fonts, updates the artwork with additional icon themes, and an improved desktop theme, and makes the lubuntu-extra-sessions package optional.
On the applications front, we can notice that Lubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) uses the fast and lightweight PCManFM file manager with support for Gvfs and GIO, the fast and extensible Openbox window manager for the LXDE desktop environment, the LightDM login manager with the simple GTK greeter, and the famous Mozilla Firefox web browser.
Just like Ubuntu 15.10, Lubuntu 15.10 is powered by Linux kernel 4.2. Unfortunately, a few issues remain unresolved in this release, so we recommend that you take a look at the list of known issues for Lubuntu 15.10 before reporting bugs. They will be fixed sometime in the near future, but until then you can either upgrade from Lubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) using the built-in Software Updater utility, or download Lubuntu 15.10 right now from Softpedia.
