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.
Ubuntu hasn’t been focused on the desktop for many years now. Their cash cow is server and compute, and the desktop only exists as an afterthought, judging by the ever increasing bugs I see in the desktop installer and the OS itself every time I test a new release. It’s unstable as hell, buggy as hell, and Snap is proprietary and closed source, making it a non-starter for anyone serious about open source desktop computing. And it isn’t just the regular cadence releases; LTS releases are just as full of holes. Meanwhile, Ubuntu server is rock solid, because that’s all they care about now.
Many of the desktop-focused derivatives (Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, etc) pick up the slack and spend ever more time and effort fixing all the issues with using it as a desktop/workstation OS. These derivatives show that desktop Ubuntu could be as awesome as it was in the old days before it was allowed to rot in the name of massive profits.
Not just Ubuntu, even Suse has replaced Yast with some internal webserver config page. If any of the major players were serious about the desktop, they’d fork Wayland and add basic desktop features like remembering window placement, screen sharing, etc. It’s basically a display server for headless servers at the moment.
dark2,
I felt Yast was very good. They replaced it with a web interface? That’s too bad I’m not a regular SUSE linux user, but I have demoed it and I felt it was really nice.
> I felt Yast was very good. They replaced it with a web interface?
SUSE has moved to Cockpit which was created by Red Hat.
https://cockpit-project.org/
@dark2
I am not going to get into another Wayland rant on OSnews but I have been screen sharing on Wayland for years now. I have to use Teams professionally multiple evenings per week for example (not by choice but it certainly works fine on Wayland). XDG Session Management was formally released with Wayland Protocols 1.48 but KDE has been remembering window size and placement for quite some time. I am not sure if GNOME does yet. I am not a GNOME user. I am not sure what you other issues with Wayland are. Perhaps they have also been addressed.
Let’s hope that the government move to GNU/Linux brings a bit more focus on the desktop. Although I imagine Mint et al are regularly upstreaming their fixes.
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.
@Drumhellar
Good news for you.
https://fedoraproject.org/workstation/download/
Left ubuntu long before any of the fake intelligence hype. Main reason being that canonical has somewhat lower standards on what is ready for lts releases than I have
On my resource constrained systems, the snaps being distinctly non-snappy was the proverbial straw.
The blahblah about “native support for industry-leading AI/ML toolkits like NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm” is just a joke (linux had “native support” for cuda since cuda exists), not “AI nonsense”.
Anyway, ubuntu… nah. My own linux of choice has been debian testing since woody, any swings to rh, slack, gentoo, fedora, ubuntu, etc just distractions. Work however, that’s a different story, “work linux” has been ubuntu for a really high number of years both srv&ws (as I imagine for many others too) thankfully gui envs of choice – ubuntu gui/desktop started a continuous downhill run in 2011
Ugh. Snaps.
I think the anti-AI statement is out of proportion here. The announcement is clearly focused on getting the tools for development out of the box, ready, because many people know way too well how freaking 36-inch-dildo PITA is to stabilize CUDA in Linux. Paradoxically, the Windows-inspired default automatic update policies of Ubuntu of recent years are the fastest way to break your installation. I just installed a new dual-GPU system recently, and man, what a freaking pain it was. Just when all was working, a forced automatic update broke everything, so we had to disable all automatic updates, which is way harder these days than you may think. We often complain about Windows’ anti-user-update mechanisms, but the latest Ubuntu approach is even more painful to work around, and it hasn’t received much acknowledgment. I know we all love to hate Microsoft, but some decisions by Ubuntu on similar fronts are equally annoying.
What is the best distro for Nvidia + wayland nowadays?
@dsmogor
Probably CachyOS.