After a much needed break for various reasons including an addition to the family. It's time to bring this puppy back to life. I still use it every single day..... I eat what I spin. It's going to be rethought from top to bottom. The same but different.
Huzzah! I'm really looking forward to it. I highly recommend some deployment of it with ZFS (https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu-18.04-Root-on-ZFS). I've been using ZFS everywhere, including both servers and laptops. It is the file system to rule all file systems. I copied most of your desktop configurations for my ZFS laptop deployments.
You can probably use ZFS snapshots to generate respins. I've been interested in leveraging ZFS snapshots to generate ISOs or virtual machines but haven't gotten to that yet.
There have been some major hangups in the next version.. which is one of the reasons I've waited so long to try and update it... they're actively trying to kill the gtk version of lxde since they're concentrating on lxqt... which personally I feel was a terrible move... but I'm drudging through it and am back on track.
This is great news. For my really old subnotebook - I use lxle daily - lxqt and Lubuntu's future is also a "terrible move". So we'll have to wait patiently if the next lxle might still be useable for a dual core 1.7 ghz^^. I think it will be^^. This is such a well thought of distro. Puppy Linux was no option I see?
Amazing news and also, welcome back! I am sure the the new release will be amazing. LXLE is the only lite distro that "just works" of all the ones that I have tried.