The Lubuntu project started in March 2009, with the purpose of creating a lighter and less resource demanding alternative to the Xubuntu operating system, using the LXDE desktop environment. The ultimate goal of this project is to join the ranks of Kubuntu and Xubuntu, and become an officially supported derivative of Ubuntu.

The developers claim that, while Xubuntu is often represented as a lightweight distro, it actually fails on running on older hardware, so they are targeting Linux their distribution at older legacy computers and devices with less than 256 MB of RAM.

While this project hasn't received too much attention until now, the LXDE project received an invitation to become a self-maintained component of Ubuntu back in February 2009, straight from the Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth.

Under the management of Mario Behling, the project received a project logo and an official Ubuntu wiki page, that includes a list of desired applications, packages and components.