As expected, Lubuntu is one of the opt-in flavors for the two Alpha and one Beta build of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system from Canonical, and Lubuntu 16.04 LTS Alpha 2 just arrived earlier for testing.
The release notes for Lubuntu 16.04 LTS Alpha 2 are, as usual, minimal, and they only inform us about the fact that there won't be an LXQt migration for this cycle, as the operating system will be GTK-based, built on top of the same, old-school LXDE desktop environment.
We reported yesterday on the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) Alpha 2 for the opt-in flavors, which included Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Kylin, and Ubuntu Cloud, but we didn't mention the fact that all of them are still powered by the same Linux 4.3 kernel packages used in Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).
So, yeah, Lubuntu 16.04 LTS Alpha 2 ships today with the same Linux kernel 4.3 packages, but the final release will without any doubt be based on the long-term-supported Linux 4.4 kernel. The fact of the matter is that the Ubuntu Kernel Team promised to push the Linux kernel 4.4 LTS packages to the stable repos by the end of the month.
Lubuntu 16.04 LTS now runs on PowerPC machines, with LXQt
There's some good news for Lubuntu fans, though, today, as the development team proudly announced that thanks to tester Herminio Hernandez Jr., the Lubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system now runs on PowerPC machines too, after we reported two weeks ago that it can successfully be used on a Raspberry Pi 2 SBC, with the LXQt desktop environment.
If you're the proud owner of a PPC machine and you want to install the Lubuntu Linux operating system on it, all you need to do is download today's Lubuntu 16.04 LTS Alpha 2 ISO image, install it like you would install the OS on any other system, and then follow the instructions provided by the Lubuntu team on the project's wiki page to install the LXQt desktop environment.
