Having gotten sick of Windows 7 Starter Edition for being so ridiculously slow on my Netbook, not long after I bought it I installed Lubuntu so that I could actually get things done without having to wait an age for stuff to load (and that was after an upgrade to 2GB of RAM).
So, since then I have kept Windows 7 on my netbook for the sake of being able to do stuff I only knew how to in Windows, and because I was not entirely used to/comfortable with linux yet. Now, however, I have decided to make Lubuntu my permanent OS on this machine, my only gripe being that the default Desktop Environment isn't exactly the most pleasant to look at…
I understand that this is partly because of the fact that it is so lightweight, and my Netbook might struggle with some of the effects in full desktop OSes… However, there must be some still relatively lightweight alternatives which look nicer.
I'm jealous of how beautiful an interface Ubuntu's Unity is, but I wouldn't dare try and run it on this little thing.
Best Answer
You seem to be asking how to install a more fully featured user interface on Lubuntu.
Lubuntu is Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop environment instead of GNOME/Unity. In some ways we talk about it as a separate, derivative distribution, but really, it's just Ubuntu with different packages installed.
You may want to try the Xfce desktop environment, which is lighter-weight than GNOME (whether GNOME with Unity or GNOME with GNOME Shell). Xfce uses more resources than LXDE, but you may find it runs well on your machine. I recommend trying it. Unless you're very low on disk space, installing it shouldn't cause any problems, and you can always decide not to use it if you don't like it.
The best way to install Xfce on Ubuntu (or Lubuntu, or any other derivative) is usually to install the xubuntu-desktop
package.
You can do that in the Lubuntu Software Center (which you may or may not have, depending on what version of Lubuntu you installed), or the Synaptic package manager (which you should have if you don't have a Software Center). Or run this command in an LXTerminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):
Then log out, and on the login screen, you can select Xubuntu as your session type.
For information on using Xfce in Ubuntu, see the Xubuntu website.