Removing a program asks to remove lubuntu-desktop

When you want to remove a program from Lubuntu, you may be told that by doing so it will remove lubuntu-desktop. The package lubuntu-desktop is only used for the installation of lubuntu and can safely be removed. The lubuntu-desktop package would need to be reinstalled before upgrading the OS (i.e., from 12.04 to 12.10).

A smarter way to solve this is to mark the package as manually installed:

sudo apt-mark manual lubuntu-desktop

The lubuntu-desktop package is a meta-package. Metapackages are a simple, fast way to install a large number of programs, which are marked as dependents of the metapackage. It is a design decision that all packages included in lubuntu-desktop depend on it, so as to be able to use --no-install-recommends option when the initial installation occurs, thus preventing non-essential programs being installed.