I’m not sure many OSNews readers still use Ubuntu as their operating system of choice, and from the release announcement of today’s Ubuntu 26.04 it’s clear why that’s the case.
Resolute Raccoon builds on the resilience-focused improvements introduced in interim releases, with TPM-backed full-disk encryption, improved support for application permission prompting, Livepatch updates for Arm-based servers, and Rust-based utilities for enhanced memory safety. This release brings native support for industry-leading AI/ML toolkits like NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm, making Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ideal platform for AI development and production workloads.
↫ Canonical press release
It’s obvious where Canonical’s focus lies with Ubuntu, and us desktop people who don’t like “AI” aren’t it. On top of all the “AI” nonsense, this new version comes with all the latest versions of the various open source components that make up a Linux distribution, as well as a slew of Rust-based replacements for core CLI tools, like sudo-rs, uutils coreutils, and more.
All the derivative release of Ubuntu, like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and others, will also be updated over the coming days. If you’re already running any of these, updating won’t be a surprise to you.
> It’s obvious where Canonical’s focus lies with Ubuntu, and us desktop people who don’t like “AI” aren’t it
I would think that “desktop people” would be mostly influenced by Ubuntu’s inclusion of GNOME 50 since that defines the actual desktop experience. Or perhaps their inclusion of a very up-to-date kernel impacts “desktop people” but again, I would think, in quite a positive way.
The Rust utils provide pretty much the identical user experience and so I am not sure how they impact “desktop people” either. The revulsion against those would seem to be about the license and I would describe such “people” with a label other than “desktop”.
Did I miss there being any actual AI in the desktop?
> This release brings native support for industry-leading AI/ML toolkits like NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm
This has no impact on your at all unless you are an AI developer, in which case better CUDA is probably a plus. If Ubuntu decided to ship with Clang, would ” It’s obvious where Canonical’s focus lies with Ubuntu, and us desktop people who don’t like C++ aren’t it” make sense as a summary?
I do not much like Ubuntu but this seems like one of their better releases in a long time.
I can’t help but feel Ubuntu are missing a marketing trick right now.
They are a UK based distro at a time when the EU and UK are looking to diversify away from US tech reliance. It would be an ideal time to target governments (local and national) as a desktop alternative to Windows.
But to do that, and to be adopted at any reasonable scale, they need to made Landscape a true MDM solution for Linux desktops and tie the life cycle together..
As a linked aside, I’d be interested in seeing/reading an OSNews article about the viability of non-us tech dependency in the current technology ecosystem!
This release announcement has me excited for Fedora 44 coming out in less than a week.