With the migration to LXQt ecosystem, Lubuntu team is planning to revise their initial design goals and to take a new direction. The initial design goal of Lubuntu was to provide a lightweight operating system that can revive older hardware. In the past, this distribution was a success in accomplishing its mission.

The concept of older machine changes over the time. The rough goal of Lubuntu was to work smoothly on a 10 years old hardware. If we think of a 10 years old hardware now, it will be having a modern processor with a minimum of 2GB RAM and 64-bit compatibility. Today, most of the Ubuntu derivatives can run smoothly run on a system with 2GB of the RAM. So, the design goal of Lubuntu is almost obsolete now. This idea brought a lot of internal debates within the Lubuntu community and the team finally decided to go with a more modern design approach.

Despite the direction change, Lubuntu can still work on older hardware. But, the main goal of the distribution will be providing a more modern user experience to the users. Other decisions made by the Lubuntu team includes,

• Lubuntu will leverage modern, Qt-based technologies and programs to give users a functional yet modular experience.
• In collaboration with others, Lubuntu will continue to be a transparent and open distribution which makes it a priority to keep the community informed about the development when possible.
• Lubuntu will create and maintain complete documentation which will be included by default in the operating system and can guide anyone from beginner to expert on how to use Lubuntu to its full potential and contribute to the further development of it.
• Lubuntu will keep a light experience by default but enable users to utilize more heavy and featureful components as desired.
• Lubuntu will have the ability to be used in any language across the world, and enable contributors to easily translate all components of the operating system.

For more information, read the official statement on changing the design goals of Lubuntu.