OSES

Seven official flavors offer alternatives to the default Wayland-only desktop – and Xfce looks like the leanest

FEATURE: Ubuntu doesn't just mean GNOME – or Wayland. Alongside the default edition of Ubuntu 26.04 last week, editions with seven other desktops were released, five of which still offer X.org.

Just under a fortnight ago, we covered the launch of Ubuntu 26.04. Ubuntu's default desktop is GNOME, and this version contains GNOME 50, which is Wayland-only. It can still run X11 apps, but you can't log in using X.org any longer – which also means many traditional X11-based tools, from desktop recording to remote control to logging in over the network, no longer work. There are alternative ways to do most things, but work habits may need to be adjusted.

Seven different desktops to choose from

You're not obliged to use GNOME, though. There are multiple officially approved Ubuntu flavors: they're still Ubuntu, with the same core OS built from the same versions of the same components, and the same additional apps – but with different desktops.

To gain their official status, all the flavors are built solely from FOSS code from Ubuntu's own repositories, and they must follow Canonical's standards: so, for instance, they all use Firefox and Thunderbird, packaged as snaps, plus LibreOffice, and they don't include rival packaging tools such as Flatpak. They're all developed by volunteers from the community, rather than by Canonical itself; the company merely provides the building blocks: the component packages, the bug-tracking tools, and so on. Most use Canonical's installation program, Subiquity, but a few use the cross-distro Calamares installer instead, and some use this to offer some optional extra applications on top of the standard Ubuntu ones.

GNOME is a highly opinionated desktop. It's been thoroughly stripped down, removing things like menu bars found in most computers' graphical environments. Some people like it, finding it clean, simple, and good-looking. Others find it restrictive and limiting. Most Ubuntu flavors offer a desktop experience resembling Microsoft Windows, although possibly simplified or with a different default arrangement of the components. The main exception is Ubuntu Unity, which offers a layout that's more like Apple macOS – but driven by Windows navigation keystrokes and shortcuts.

All the flavors differ from the official GNOME version in one significant respect. LTS editions of Ubuntu get five years of updates and fixes for free (and another decade if you sign up for the Ubuntu Pro services, which is free of charge for up to five machines). This includes the GNOME desktop – and only GNOME. The LTS releases of the flavors have different support lifespans, with at most three years of support. You can still join Ubuntu Pro, but the desktop and graphical apps that aren't part of the baseline GNOME-based Ubuntu won't get updates after three years.

In essence, this means two things. If you choose one of the flavors, you should upgrade every two years when a new LTS appears. Alternatively, if you want a traditional desktop but want to stay on GNOME and its five years of updates, then your best bet may be to install GNOME Flashback and use that.

In the website's own order, the flavors are:

• Kubuntu – the oldest official remix, with KDE Plasma 6.6.
• Lubuntu – the lightest-weight flavor, with LXQt 2.3.
• Ubuntu Budgie – with the latest Budgie 10.10.
• Ubuntu Cinnamon – with Cinnamon 6.4.13.
• Ubuntu Kylin – with UKUI 4.
• Ubuntu Unity – with Canonical's own in-house desktop, Unity 7.7.1.
• Xubuntu – a lightweight flavor with Xfce 4.20.

There are also two others we won't look at here, because they use the same desktop as other editions, differing only in the preinstalled apps. Edubuntu uses the standard GNOME desktop, and comes preinstalled with a collection of educational apps aimed at school-age children. Ubuntu Studio uses the same KDE Plasma desktop as Kubuntu, and bundles an assortment of apps aimed at creative artists, including audio, graphics, video, photography and publishing. Edubuntu uses the stock GNOME desktop, and Ubuntu Studio the same Plasma desktop as Kubuntu, so the resource comparisons for those flavors apply to them equally – plus the space taken by their additional applications.

Not included in this list is Ubuntu MATE. It still exists, but there's no version 26.04. The latest Ubuntu MATE is 25.10, which is in support for a few more months, so if you want the MATE desktop's GNOME 2-style experience, we'd suggest version 24.04, which will be supported until 2027. Project lead Martin Wimpress has stepped down to focus on his new project, Nøughty Linux. Ubuntu MATE is a popular version, and we suspect that some new maintainers will step up and that MATE will be back in the Ubuntu fold soon, perhaps in version 26.10.

Kubuntu

Kubuntu is the oldest of the official Ubuntu flavors, and in its early years was the only one with its own full-time paid member of the Canonical team working on it. Today, like all the others, it's a completely community-driven effort.

Kubuntu 26.04 comes with KDE Plasma 6.6.4, the latest update to Plasma 6.6, whose release we covered in February.

Like the GNOME edition, Kubuntu defaults to offering only Wayland, but unlike with GNOME, you can install X.org and log in using it if you prefer.

Over its decade of support, Plasma 5 received considerable optimization, and later versions used comparatively little disk and memory. Plasma 6 has undone a lot of this work, and Plasma 6.6 is one of the most resource-heavy desktops in the FOSS world. In our testing, a full install of Kubuntu "Resolute" took 11.24 GB of disk, excluding its half-gig swapfile. That's more than any other flavor, including the GNOME version. It uses about 1.1 GB of RAM at idle, which is the same as GNOME.

KDE Plasma 6.0 appeared in February 2024, making it too late for Ubuntu 24.04. As such, this is the first LTS version of Kubuntu with Plasma 6. If you like both Ubuntu and the KDE environment, this is a good choice – but it's one of the biggest and heaviest forms of Ubuntu there is.

Lubuntu

Lubuntu 26.04 is almost the reverse of Ubuntu. In its stock form, it's the lightest-weight flavor of Ubuntu. It uses LXQt 2.3.0 as its desktop, a lightweight desktop environment with a Windows-like layout. LXQt has optionally supported Wayland for a couple of years now, but Lubuntu ships with plain old X.org and nothing else.

Sadly, this isn't the latest version – LXQt 2.4.0 appeared shortly before the Resolute Raccoon release, so it was too new to be included. The Lubuntu team may well make an upgrade available as an optional update later, though – it has done so before. Lubuntu uses the same Calamares installer as Kubuntu.

LXQt is very simple, and not as customizable even as its own ancestor LXDE. For instance, placing the taskbar vertically doesn't work well – window buttons display sideways, meaning that few of them fit, and they're hard to read. Worse still, the setting to add more rows of buttons doesn't work. At least in recent releases, the start menu's search box is automatically cleared after you launch an app. LXQt is well into its version 2.x generation, while its forerunner LXDE never even got to version 1.0 – but even so, LXQt still feels unfinished.

We also had some driver issues in VirtualBox, and even with the Guest Additions installed, we had to pick the safe but unaccelerated VBoxSVGA GPU to get to the desktop at all.

The login screen offers three session types. Lubuntu gives the default desktop. The LXQt Desktop option has the same layout, but with no theme or icons loaded, so it's not very usable. The third is Openbox, which gives a totally blank desktop with only the window manager. That's perfectly usable if you know your way around it, but BunsenLabs 13 offers a better Openbox experience.

For this release generation, Lubuntu is somewhat lighter than its siblings, but not drastically. Its ISO file is a modest 3.6 GB. Like Kubuntu, on our 8 GB test VM, it configured a swap file of just half a gig, which disguises a significant disk footprint: it takes a hefty 10.1 GB of space, with all the optional apps the installer offers. That's a lot for what's meant to be the lightweight flavor.

If you're happy with a plain old horizontal taskbar and the basic apps, and if you only have 2-3 GB of RAM, Lubuntu is the lightest full desktop Canonical can offer you – but it's not as slim as it used to be.

Ubuntu Budgie

Ubuntu Budgie 26.04 contains the latest version of the Budgie desktop environment, originally developed for the independent Solus distro.

This release uses Budgie 10.10.2, and the desktop is now Wayland-only. This effort has been underway for some years, and we reported on early Enlightenment-based efforts, then a later change of approach which led away from Enlightenment. Earlier this year, Budgie 10.10 completed the switch.

Budgie is built using GNOME tooling such as Gtk4 and the Vala programming language, but avoiding bulkier components such as the Javascript-based GNOME Shell. This makes it relatively slim, and it does look great. It can be configured in a Windows-like layout with taskbar, but Ubuntu Budgie ships it with a top panel and a 3D-look dock at the bottom center. The Welcome screen has a Makeover & Layouts tool that makes it easy to pick different themes and desktop layouts without manual customization.

It's not only one of the best-looking flavors, it's also one of the lighter ones. The ISO takes 3.8 GB, and excluding its 4 GB swap file, a full install takes 7.86 GB of disk space, and uses just 805 MB of RAM at idle. This vulture and Budgie are not well acquainted, but if you want a decorative but lightweight pure-Wayland setup, then check out the Resolute Budgie.

Ubuntu Cinnamon

Ubuntu Cinnamon 26.04 also offers a modern, Windows-like desktop that looks good. The Cinnamon desktop, here version 6.4.13, is taken from Linux Mint, a third-party Ubuntu-based OS.

Cinnamon is based on a fork of GNOME Shell, so this is not a lightweight environment, but even so it has advantages. It still uses X.org, so all your X11 apps will work. Unlike MATE, it has good support for fractional scaling – handy for HiDPI displays.

We like its retro-Ubuntu-style orange-and-brown default theme. The apps and accessories are a slightly odd mix of Cinnamon and GNOME components, meaning that some apps have traditional title, menu, and toolbars, and others have the GNOME-style combined control and hamburger menus. Linux Mint itself is more coherent here.

It's a middleweight remix: the ISO is 5.25 GB, and it uses just over a gig of RAM at idle. Excluding the 4 GB swap file, though, it uses a reasonable 8.5 GB of disk, which isn't bad.

For MATE exiles looking for a relatively traditional Windows-like environment, this will do the job – but it's bigger and more demanding.

Ubuntu Kylin

Ubuntu Kylin 26.04 is the latest release of the special edition of Ubuntu aimed at the Chinese market, but it also offers US English as an option, and works well for anyone.

Ubuntu Kylin has its own home-grown desktop, UKUI 4, which is also used in some other Chinese distros. It's a colorful modern take on the basic Windows-style design, and it's based around X11 for the traditionally minded.

Saying that, though, like Lubuntu, it had some difficulties with the display in our VM, and we needed to install the guest additions for it to display properly, and we still saw some display glitches.

The session type menu on the login screen, oddly, contains four different desktops. Two, called lightdm-xsession and kylin-wlcom, didn't work; ukui opened the normal Ubuntu Kylin desktops. A final one labeled ubuntu to our astonishment opened a full GNOME 50 desktop. That definitely shouldn't be in there, and casts some doubt on the quality control process for this flavor. We removed it and all its associated dependencies, and the UKUI desktop seemed unaffected.

Having these unnecessary extras lying around may be connected to why Kylin Resolute had such a big memory footprint: a whopping 1.4 GB, the biggest memory footprint in this roundup. Excluding the swap file, its disk usage is 10.2 GB, which is on the high side – although if you're so untidy you leave Clutter lying around forgotten, this is perhaps not so surprising.

Ubuntu Unity

Ubuntu Unity remix is back! Ubuntu Unity 26.04 has returned, after skipping the 25.10 release due to a shortage of manpower. Several new volunteers have stepped up, as the README credits:

 Introducing new maintainers and contributors (welcome Tomasz, Gautham,   Kavish, Alfred, Lexi and Azzy!)

It also thanks Aaron Rainbolt, Andreas Hasenack, c4pp4 from gentoo unity7, Erich Eickmeyer, Jeremy Bicha, Sebastien Bacher, Skia, and Thomas Ward. This goes to show that the Unity environment does still have enthusiastic supporters out there, as well as this vulture. Several bits of plumbing have been replaced with equivalents that are newer and still actively maintained, although there is a list of known issues.

Ubuntu Unity 26.04 is not an LTS release, although the underlying OS will receive updates and the team will support it for as long as it can. Longer term, the hope is that the Lomiri environment, formerly known as Unity 8 and which had an experimental 24.04 release, will be mature enough to form the basis of Ubuntu Unity 28.04.

We're still really glad to see it back, and in our testing, it seems stable and usable. It's not a lightweight setup any more, though: in our testing, a full install took just under 10.7 GB of disk and consumed a little over 1 GB of RAM at idle. That's not terrible – Kubuntu is even bigger – but there's room for some pruning and trimming.

Xubuntu

Xubuntu 26.04 is the 20th anniversary release of Xubuntu – after Kubuntu, it's the next oldest of the official remixes. It is simple and quite minimalist: there's no welcome screen, no flashy dock, no fancy themes or anything. It has a very simple desktop layout, with a single panel at the top of the screen, an unlabeled app-launch menu, desktop icons for the home directory and trash, and nothing else. This classic look is now well enough established that it's replicated by the Debian sid-based Xebian distro.

All flavors of Ubuntu offer a minimal install, which includes little more than the Firefox web browser. Xubuntu goes quite a bit further. The minimal installation option installs what used to be called Xubuntu Core. It's the basic Ubuntu OS, and the Xfce desktop, and that's all. This contains no additional applications or snaps whatsoever, not even a web browser.

If you want an extremely compact edition of Ubuntu to add your own apps to, this is the one. Better still, it is available as a separate minimal edition, with its own distinct ISO file you can download.

Standard Xubuntu is a 4.8 GB ISO file, takes 7.9 GB of disk when installed with all the trimmings, and uses about 880 MB of RAM at idle. Xubuntu Minimal is a 3 GB ISO, it takes just 4.5 gigs of disk, and uses 685 MB of RAM.

Compared to the others, this means that a default install of Xubuntu takes about 2.5 GB less disk space than Lubuntu, and only about 20 megabytes more RAM – while being far more customizable. But compared to that, Xubuntu Minimal is the smallest Ubuntu flavor of all.

Xubuntu Minimal is also the easiest flavor from which to completely remove snap support. We've got no problem with snap – it works, does the job, and it makes life much easier when it's time to upgrade your OS.

Best of all, the implementation is simple and clean enough that we understand it. Trying to wrap our head around how the Flatpak infrastructure works made us think of H.P. Lovecraft (or more saliently, Charles Stross): there are tentacles down there, and nightmare horrors from before time. Bring in OStree as well, and it all turns a bit CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.

Still, different people like different things, and there's no accounting for taste. We know lots of folks dislike Snap but are fine with Flatpak. If you want a simple clean version of Ubuntu, with a desktop that can easily look like the lamented Ubuntu MATE in a few clicks, then Xubuntu is your best bet. If, on top of that, you want to remove Snap, then you can whip it out of Xubuntu Minimal with a couple of commands.

How we tested

We tested on the latest VirtualBox 7.2.8, hosted on a quad-core Core i7 Mac with 32 GB of RAM. We assigned all the VMs 8 GB of RAM and two CPU cores, with 3D graphics acceleration enabled and 128 MB of virtual VRAM. We left the disk size on the default 25 GB and traditional BIOS firmware. We did a full install of all the flavors, saying yes to optional drivers and codecs, local apps, and any extra packages the installer offered.

We downloaded all the remixes on the day of release, using BitTorrent (and we left them seeding for 24 hours to help anyone else trying to torrent them). We installed all updates using the command line:

sudo -s
apt update
apt full-upgrade -y
snap refresh

Then we cleared the APT cache, and just in case, cleaned up any superseded updates – not that there were any, just days after release.

apt autoremove -y
apt purge
apt clean

The results

We put these in order of which is the biggest (on disk) down to which is the smallest. Less is more: the less code you have installed, the less there is to go wrong, the less to be attacked or exploited, and the more of your computer's efforts are spent on you, rather than wasted by inefficient code – or lazy coders.

Conclusions

Depending on what you want, there are lots of good reasons to skip over the mainstream Ubuntu GNOME desktop and choose one of the official flavors instead.

If you want a rich, flexible, and very complete Windows-like desktop, then Kubuntu is a solid choice. The Plasma ecosystem has a huge catalog of supplementary apps and tools that integrate very well into the desktop. Kubuntu is big, though, and it's very complex to customize.

KDE Plasma has a lot of enthusiastic admirers, and the Reg FOSS desk has got a lot of flak for criticizing it. We're sorry, but we have yet to change our mind. To our eyes, KDE's graphic design is clunky and unattractive. The Plasma desktop and all KDE apps are over-cluttered with redundant options; for instance, they sport not one but two About options on the Help menu, one with info about that specific app, and the other with general information about KDE as a whole – which, crucially, does not tell you what version you're running. The configuration options are similarly cluttered. This is not an environment we could recommend to beginners or less-technical folks, although it's great for tinkerers.

If you want a modern Wayland-based environment, a Windows-like layout, and great looks, then Ubuntu Budgie is great, and it's light and fast, too.

Our personal favorite remains Ubuntu Unity: if you know how to navigate Windows with the keyboard, everything works, but with Mac-like looks – and a more powerful mouse-driven UI than macOS itself. (We love the indicators showing how many windows an app has open, and the ability to open a new empty one with a middle-click.) An honourable mention goes to Ubuntu Budgie: it doesn't do anything startlingly original, but it's a great-looking middleweight.

But overall, for us, there is a clear winner here.

You may have heard of Wallace's Two-out-of-Three Theory:

SPEED – QUALITY – PRICE

Pick any Two.

Well, just once in a long while, something offering all three comes along. Xfce is that desktop. It's solid code, older even than KDE 1.0, and very stable. It's fast, because it's small, but you get 3D compositing to use your fancy GPU. You can have a GNOME-style overview. You can even add a tiling window manager if that's your thing. And it's cheap: because it was first written some 30 years ago, this is small, tight, heavily optimized code, so it's frugal with your computer's resources.

You get speed, and quality, and a low price (in usage). That's an unbeatable bargain. True, it's not the prettiest, but as we said a few weeks ago, Zorin OS Lite shows that Xfce can look great with a lick of paint and some polishing. Start at Xfce-look.org and find something appealing. For instance, if you like it retro, then Chicago95 looks amazing. ®