Ubuntu Archive

It wasn’t too long ago that new Ubuntu releases were major happenings in the Linux world, as it was the default Linux distribution for many, both old and newcomers, in the desktop Linux space. These days, Ubuntu release hit a little different, with Canonical’s focus having shifted much more to the enterprise, and several aspects of the distribution being decidedly unpopular, like the snap package management system. Still, Ubuntu is probably still one of the most popular, if not the most popular, distributions out there, so any new release, like today’s Ubuntu 24.0 LTS, is still a big deal. Ubuntu Desktop brings the Subiquity installer to an LTS for the first time. In addition to a refreshed user experience and a minimal install by default, the installer now includes experimental support for ZFS and TPM-based full disk encryption and the ability to import auto-install configurations. Post install, users will be greeted with the latest GNOME 46 alongside a new App Center and firmware-updater. Netplan is now the default for networking configuration and supports bidirectionality with NetworkManager. ↫ Utkarsh Gupta on ubuntu-announce Of course, all the various other Ubuntu editions have also seen new releases: Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu. Yes, that’s a long list. They all mostly share the same improvements as Ubuntu’s main course, but paired with the latest versions of the respective desktop environments instead. Except for Kubuntu. Unlike just about any other major distribution released over the last few months, such as Fedora 40 only a few days ago, Kubuntu does not ship with the new KDE Plasma 6, opting for Plasma 5.27.11 instead. There simply wasn’t enough time between the release of Plasma 6 and the Ubuntu feature freeze, so they made the – in my opinion – understandable call to stick to Plasma 5 for now, moving Plasma 6 to the next release later this year.

So with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the ability to continue with a standard EXT4 file-system install, an encrypted file-system using LVM, or using OpenZFS with/without encryption. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS also has the ability to enjoy hardware-backed full-disk encryption with TPM as another new experimental option. Or, of course, the Ubuntu desktop installer continues supporting manual (custom) partitioning as well. ↫ Michael Larabel I just use whatever Btrfs setup Fedora automatically recommends when I let it take over a disk – file systems for desktops seems a bit like a solved problem to me personally – but I’m still curious what benefits, for instance, an OpenZFS setup could bring to a desktop user compared to Btrfs or a basic Ext4 setup. Why should a desktop user use OpenZFS?

Today, Canonical announced the general availability of Legacy Support, an Ubuntu Pro add-on that expands security and support coverage for Ubuntu LTS releases to 12 years. The add-on will be available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS onwards.  Long term supported Ubuntu releases get five years of standard security maintenance on the main Ubuntu repository. Ubuntu Pro expands that commitment to 10 years on both the main and universe repositories, providing enterprises and end users alike access to a vast secure open source software library. The subscription also comes with a phone and ticket support tier. Ubuntu Pro paying customers can purchase an extra two years of security maintenance and support with the new Legacy Support add-on. ↫ Canonical blog Assuming all of this respects the open source licenses of the countless software packages that make up Ubuntu, this seems like a reasonable way to offer quite a long support lifecycle for those that really need it. Such support doesn’t come free, and it I think it’s entirely reasonable to try and get compensated for the work required in maintaining that level of support for 10 or 12 years. If you want this kind of longevity from your Linux installation without paying for it, you’ll have to maintain it yourself. Seems reasonable to me.

In collaboration with Polar Signals we have committed that beginning with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, our GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) package will enable frame pointers by default for 64-bit platforms. All packages in Ubuntu, with very few exceptions, will be rebuilt with frame pointers enabled, making them easier to profile and subsequently optimise. “I’ve enabled frame pointers at huge scale for Java and glibc and studied the CPU overhead for this change, which is typically less than 1% and usually so close to zero that it is hard to measure. Frame pointers allow more complete CPU profiling and off-CPU profiling. The performance wins that these can provide far outweigh the comparatively tiny loss in performance. Ubuntu enabling frame pointers by default will be a huge win for performance engineering and the default developer experience”. said Brendan Gregg, computer performance expert and Intel Fellow. ↫ Oliver Smith on the official Ubuntu blog So I guess the very minor performance regression is supposed to be compensated for by optimisations in individual packages that frame pointers will help realise.

In addition to Canonical continuing to invest in developing Mir as a platform now built atop Wayland, over the past year Canonical developers have been quietly working on Miriway as a Mir-based Wayland compositor and it’s becoming iteratively more useful. I’m not entirely sure what its purpose is.

In case you’re wondering why you can’t download the latest Ubuntu desktop version that was released earlier this week – it seems to have a bit of a rogue translation issue. A community contributor submitted offensive Ukrainian translations to a public, third party online service that we use to provide language support for the Ubuntu Desktop installer. Around three hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10 this fact was brought to our attention and we immediately removed the affected images. After completing initial triage, we believe that the incident only impacts translations presented to a user during installation through the Live CD environment (not an upgrade). During installation the translations are resident in memory only and are not propagated to the disk. If you have upgraded to Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 from a previous release, then you are not affected by this issue. That’s the difference between volunteer translations nobody checks, and proper translations that go through an extensive review process. As a translator – pay for your translations, and shit like this does not happen. Period.

Based on Ubuntu Core’s FDE design, we have been working on bringing TPM-backed full disk encryption to classic Ubuntu Desktop systems as well, starting with Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur) – where it will be available as an experimental feature. This means that passphrases will no longer be needed on supported platforms, and that the secret used to decrypt the encrypted data will be protected by a TPM and recovered automatically only by early boot software that is authorised to access the data. Besides its usability improvements, TPM-backed FDE also protects its users from “evil maid” attacks that can take advantage of the lack of a way to authenticate the boot software, namely initrd, to end users. I’m not well-versed enough on this topic to make any meaningful comments, other than as long as it’s a choice presented to users, it seems like a good thing.

The next version of the world’s most popular desktop Linux operating system (that’s Ubuntu, for those playing dumb) comes with fewer apps available out-of-the-box. Daily builds of Ubuntu 23.10 now ship with just a super-slim set of default software. These are designed to cover basic computing needs only. For anything else, the idea is that we, the user, fire up the Software Store (though the new one isn’t included in daily builds yet) and install what we want for ourselves. As an idea, it’s not without merit. But in practice, I think it’s a potential misstep. Basically, Ubuntu will no longer ship with LibreOffice, an email client, Shotwell, or a host of other applications and tools. While there’s certainly a market for slim distributions that install a lean and mean base installation for the user to expand into exactly the installation they desire, I doubt users opting for such an approach are interested in using Ubuntu, of all distributions (use Void. It’s the only Linux distribution with the official OSNews Seal of Approval™). In other words, this seems like an odd choice for a distribution aimed at relative newcomers to the Linux world. But then again, Fedora is a better choice for those people anyway.

It has been a little while since we shared our vision for Ubuntu Desktop, and explained how our current roadmap fits into our long term strategic thinking. Recently, we embarked on an internal exercise to consolidate and bring structure to our values and goals for how we plan to evolve the desktop experience over the next few years. This post is designed to share the output of those discussions and give insight into the direction we’re going. These values form the framework by which we determine our priorities and measure our progress, and hopefully inspire those that want to contribute to this experience to focus their energies in ways that are aligned with our longer term ambitions. I was hoping for more concrete ideas, plans, and ambitions from Canonical here, but this one is a bit of a nothingburger. There’s a lot happening in the desktop Linux world, especially around immutability, and I see nothing here about such long-term plans, or even relatively short-term meaningful desktop improvements.

UBPorts has released the second update for the Ubuntu Touch version based on Focal Fossa. In this new version, the System Settings application has been improved in various places, the physical camera button now works (on devices that have one, I presume), and a whole load of bugs have been fixed. Device support has also improved, with the F(x)tec Pro1 X, Fairphone 3, and Vollaphone X23 now being supported by the Focal releases.

According to Canonical’s Oliver Grawert, the next long-term support release of Ubuntu will be available to download in 2 versions: a classic, deb-based version (default) and, for the first time, an immutable, snap-based build. This makes sense, and was inevitable. I wonder how long they’re going to keep the .deb-based version around; I doubt they’d pull it any time soon. Still, competition is good, and it’s been clear for a while now that immutability is the next big thing in the desktop Linux world.

Two major Linux distributions released major new versions this week. First, Ubuntu: There’s a big user experience uplift courtesy of GNOME 44 and enhancements, and a brand new Ubuntu installer helps improves the onboarding experience. Foundationally, Ubuntu 23.04 runs on the latest Linux kernel 6.2 release, ships Mesa 23.0 graphics drivers (with in-distro access to proprietary NVIDIA drivers for those who need them), plus updates all of the requisite tooling, toolchains, and programming packages developers need. I’m curious to try the new installer if someone else adopts it (I have no need for Ubuntu), but other than that, this is a fairly small release that won’t rock the boat too much. Second we have Fedora: Fedora Workstation focuses on the desktop experience. As usual, Fedora Workstation features the latest GNOME release. GNOME 44 includes a lot of great improvements, including a new lock screen, a “background apps” section on the quick menu, and improvements to accessibility settings. In addition, enabling third-party repositories now enables an unfiltered view of applications on Flathub.  With this release, we’ve shortened the default timeout when services shut down. This helps your system power off faster — important when you need to grab your laptop and go. Fedora is, in my view, the best desktop Linux distribution, and I use it myself on two of my three main PCs. So far, Fedora 38 doesn’t feel like a major new release either, but just more of what you already know.

As part of our combined efforts, the Ubuntu flavors have made a joint decision to adjust some of the default packages on Ubuntu: Going forward, the Flatpak package as well as the packages to integrate Flatpak into the respective software center will no longer be installed by default in the next release due in April 2023, Lunar Lobster. Users who have used Flatpak will not be affected on upgrade, as flavors are including a special migration that takes this into account. Those who haven’t interacted with Flatpak will be presented with software from the Ubuntu repositories and the Snap Store. We think this will improve the out-of-the-box Ubuntu experience for new users while respecting how existing users personalize their own experiences. However, we don’t want this to come as a surprise. If you have comments specific to this change you are welcome to respond here on discourse. Canonical’s got Snap to peddle, so FlatPak is a competitor. That’s all there’s to it. I maintain they’re all bad and unnecessary – a .deb, an .rpm, and your source code is all you need to cover 99.9% of Linux users in a standard, easy-to-use, uncompromising way.

Last year, Ubuntu developers pushed to remove Zsys from Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer. This is an integral tool Ubuntu created to make it easier to manage and maintain ZFS-based installations. In a bug report they bluntly noted that ‘priority changes’ in the desktop team meant Zsys was no longer something they want to “advertise using”. As of writing, Zsys remains available in the Ubuntu archives but development of it isn’t looking healthy. Canonical’s contributions effectively fall off a cliff circa April 2021 based on GitHub commits, with only a trivial tweak made in April of last year. Daily builds for the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 release come with a brand-new installer that has been built using Flutter to Canonical’s exact needs. But guess what this new Ubuntu installer does not include? An option to install Ubuntu on the ZFS file system. I thought the Linux world had settled on Btrfs as the “ZFS-like” file system for the platform, and had no idea Canonical had even been working on giving users the option to install to ZFS. With Btrfs already being the default on e.g. Fedora for a while now, it seems that is a better route to go for Ubuntu and other distributions than trying to make ZFS work.