I have used Ubuntu for quite a while now. I haven't been a fan of the new UI and I'm looking to install a faster version of linux for my development work. I wanted to see if anyone has experience with Ubuntu Mate or Lubuntu?

How quickly do they receive security patches?
Are they generally up to date and actively maintained?
Are there advantages to vanilla Ubuntu?

What I can personally tell you is that Lubuntu is great and it works great in VirtualBox. It's as up-to-date, actively maintained and well-patched as Ubuntu is.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you, Lubuntu was what I was leaning towards because it's lightweight. I'll be doing most of my work in a terminal so I don't need the overhead and I'll be running from a low profile usb drive instead of on the primary SSD because my windows partition uses bitlocker and dual booting messes with that.

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Same for all Ubuntu-based distros, and likely also Debian.

All Ubuntu derivates like Kubuntu or Lubuntu use the same respository, so they receive the same security updates.

The difference is the desktop environment and there are different packages installed.

You also have to differ the repo channels main, restricted, universe and multiverse.

Ubuntu only includes software from main and restricted. These are maintained 5 years by Canonical.
Lubuntu also includes packages from universe and multiverse preinstalled. (LXQT is universe)
These are maintained by the community and security updates for this channel might be delayed.

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Good to know, thank you!