My lxle install was rapidly approaching the end of its shelf life and it looked like there wouldn't be a new version on the horizon. It seems that the developers of lxde/lubuntu seem to be moving away from being an uber lightweight distribution and that is something my aged battered thinkpad 420 needs in order to be snappy. Also, I'm not really interested in bells and whistles and would prefer my os to be doing as little as possible and using the systems resources for programs i'm running.

I've jumped ship and installed manjaro openbox. This is based on arch linux and is a rolling release. This should mean that I shouldn't have to reinstall unless I break things and that there shouldn't be any kind of end of life issues which were being problematic with lxle.

It's a bit sad to be leaving ubuntu, I've been the from the start but my thinkpad is snappy and the ui is sweet! Its definitely a geek friendly os but so far everything work with minimal effort. There is also a nice unity, everything is just a yay -Syu away! No more snaps, ppa or apt dist-upgrades for me.