> TPM-backed full-disk encryption is now generally available in the Ubuntu installer. By tying encryption to the TPM security chip, disk encryption is bound to a specific device, significantly raising the bar for physical access attacks while improving the user experience.
That's great, but they are also intending to comply with the OS-level age verification [1]. Initial implementations will somehow be privacy protecting, but eventually the temptation to tie a specific person to an OS fingerprint will become too great.
How long until I can selectively tell certain websites I'm a child so they stop showing me ads?
They wanted the personal computer to store and report personal information. I hope they have their best surprised faces ready for when computers report what the owner wants them to report.
That is only possible when you really are the owner. And the amount of device out there in the world where people really are the owner is rather small. (Just the Linux desktops and the GrapheneOS smartphones, etc.)
You are not quite the owner on GrapheneOS either, because of Android Key Attestation (which has functionality analogous to desktop TPMs). If you re-unlock your bootloader (say, to run a custom build of GrapheneOS), attestation will snitch on you and the subset of apps that use key attestation to require a locked bootloader and/or enforce an AVB key allowlist will not work properly. This is a very small subset of apps currently, but I don't see it getting any smaller.
GrapheneOS does everything and more for key attestation, allowing security sensitive applications to test the integrity of the device. Sadly some apps like google wallet not only check for attestation, but check if Google's signed it. Which is against the idea of attestation in the first place.
So google's tap to pay doesn't work, but others do, like garmin pay. Random bank apps are hit and miss.
> GrapheneOS does everything and more for key attestation
Right, that's the problem, in my opinion. I'm not referring to the apps that require Google's keys only, I'm referring to the ones that allow GrapheneOS keys too. If you use one of these apps, you can use vanilla GrapheneOS builds, but you cannot run your own self-signed builds.
You are gaining freedom relative to running Google's OS, but you are still not free to further modify the software running on your own device.
Apps that require "integrity" should monitor their own integrity only, they should not attempt to infer the integrity of their environment.
Trick is there's no integrity without the OS. Cheats can ruin games, keyloggers can record passwords, music/movies can be stolen, bitcoins can be stolen, etc.
I will never feel bad about blocking ads on youtube, because they have an effective monopoly on distribution of certain content. But when it comes to music, why not just use something else?
I recommend buying your own CDs (at your local music store, directly from the band when you attend their concerts, or on Bandcamp/Discogs), ripping them, and putting them on the local file system of your MP3 player, phone, your car’s SD card, etc. Sometimes if you buy a vinyl record it comes with a convenient download code, and if it doesn’t digital albums are very cheap on Bandcamp.
I also recommend tuning regularly onto your favorite radio station (mine is KEXP Seattle; and Rás 2 in Iceland) particularly when they have live performance to discover new music.
And as always, it deserves to be stressed that Sponsorblock is far more than the name suggests. It can also skip sections like intros, tangents, etc - and it's configurable per channel.
If you're listening to a music playlist on YouTube, this removes interruptions caused by the pointless intro and outro screens added to songs.
The Linux implementation I've seen is the Freedesktop implementation that just responds to a user profile flag. There's no cryptography involved, it's just like asking for a room number like the adduser command does.
Edit: well except American states don't flag your operating system as illegal unless they ask for your room number. Canonical and all the other Linux companies really like being able to make money and not spend all of their earnings on lawyers.
Ubuntu has become the bloatware distro I've grown to dislike. Luckily with a CLI-based AI, one can choose any Linux flavor and customize it to their liking.
Does anyone know of some good scripts or workflows to install Ubuntu (because it 'just works' e.g. comes with a lot of drivers) and then scale back to a Debian-like experience?
I've had issues starting with Debian because it doesn't ship with broad support for wifi hardware, and internet over USB to iphone hotspot also didn't work. The only option was to get wired ethernet to bring up wifi.
As of Debian 12, they should include the non-free firmware by default, and even before that you didn't have to jump through a lot of hoops to add support
Also, one of the better uses of AI is fixing your Ubuntu distro (presumably not the only one) when it becomes unusable after an upgrade due to replacing your Nvidia drivers or somesuch.
I've installed Ubuntu 26.04 on a desktop I had lying around and things just work. It had 24.04 before, and the update barely registered as a concern. That desktop also ran Windows, and Ubuntu was incomparably snappy, to the point I felt that my typing speed was the bottleneck.
What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.
> What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.
I've had to use Claude multiple times to fix my Ubuntu distro when an upgrade causes some part of it to stop working, and this Snap/APT mishmash sometimes confuses it too: "you need the Snap version. I was wrong you need the APT version. I was wrong you need to build from source..". Gets there in the end if you give it a bit of help.
One can choose any Linux distro that has good installation and operator's instructions, such as Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Red Hat, etc, etc, etc, and follow those instructions.
It might be hard for some youngsters and hypesters to believe, but novices were installing and operating Linux on their home computers long before LLM research even began.
im still confused, i was asking about how a cli based ai allows you to choose any linux flavor and customize. i dont understand how slop documentation answers that?
I think the poster just meant that whatever distro you choose, you don't have to stick with the default desktop and look and feel if you don't like it. If you are brave enough, then give your agentic AI CLI access. Personally I just ask AI on my phone and pick and choose from the advice.
I'm curious what the audience is for Ubuntu nowadays? If you use it - why Ubuntu over another distro? Is it still largely a beginner-friendly stepping stone?
I use it because I am very happy with the release schedule and the maturity. I don't want to use the latest greatest. I want something that works and has some manpower (and maybe money) behind it. I am not the biggest fan of snap but I know how to get around it.
I don't like immutable distros. I play around too much. I tried normal Fedora but an update broke my graphics stack and I didn't like that. Other than that I am used to Deb and it just works.
Like most things, I imagine there are multiple audiences for Ubuntu. But for me:
- Inertia, I've used it for a long time.
- It's based on Debian. I like Debian and use it on servers.
- I chose it originally because it had better desktop support than Debian. It's possible that Debian is now also good, but see above...inertia.
- It (mostly) just works on a wide range of hardware, whilst remaining up-to-date with the latest Linux developments.
- I like the release cycles. Debian stable is too stable. Arch/Fedora/Debian-testing are too volatile. Ubuntu allows me to choose whether to follow the 9-month support window of a normal release; or the 5-year window of the LTS.
Everything above is highly subjective and by no means are other preferences invalid. All Linux distros are awesome in their own unique way.
I used to run Arch out of engineering school (that's what we used there), and loved it. But as I started working on my business, I started having less time to simply configure my OS and fight it on a few things. The breaking point for me, when I switched to Ubuntu Desktop, was not being able to connect to my two monitors via a dock (2 display ports). It simply took too much of my time to figure out all the nuances of evdi between my Thinkpad and my Dell monitors - Ubuntu just...worked (I could have spent more time understanding the issue, but I just needed it to work)
But as I get older and am starting to rethink my tech stack, I'm strongly considering going back to my dear Arch
I use it because I like how it looks, it has sane defaults and is reliable. I am an "LTS to LTS" type person. My desktop pretty much looks like the default screenshots. Most of my customization comes through scripts and tools that I can install quickly after a reimage. Not a beginner.
I first touched it around 2010 and didn't like the desktop environment. Someone showed me the different flavors and I settled on XFCE (Xubuntu). I'm still using an Ubuntu flavor just for its APT repository. I'm of the unsubstantiated belief that if a distro has a large userbase, it will have a better maintained repository, so I will probably never leave.
I had a programming class just as Ubuntu was getting started, and the instructor gave us live CDs. I toyed with it for a few months, but went back to Windows.
A few years later (2008-ish), my college issued everybody Thinkpads. The default solution to nearly every problem was "re-image". Strangely, the images they used still had the 4-ish GB OEM recovery partition. I had enough insight to know they didn't use it. After searching for a user-friendly distro that could fit in 4GB, I settled on Xubuntu. I've since moved away from it (and Ubuntu in general), but not XFCE.
I'm mostly a MacOS user now, but my Linux box is Ubuntu because that's just what I've been using. It's what I know, it's stable and just does what I want.
It used to be my "it just works" distro for systems I didn't want to spend time configuring, but they managed to make me feel like a second-class citizen as a not-enterprise-customer (not really anything specific, just a lot of small cuts).
I appreciate that they're running a business, but the Fedora/RHEL split feels much cleaner, and Fedora is my current go-to in instances where I used to reach for Ubuntu. (Or I use Debian, for headless/server setups)
Ubuntu Just Works and makes you update your OS once every five years if you use the free plan, ten years if you're not a business and use a free account, and even longer if you're a company. Not even Microsoft offers that.
It's also the reference OS for tons of free software out there.
At some point you just want something that works and is somewhat familiar, so sticking with a distro makes sense even when it becomes somewhat annoying.
I remember the early days of Linux when I'd be using a dial-up modem to overnight download Linus' hot-off-the-press kernel tarballs to build myself and update my system ... nowadays I just want a working computer with minimum fuss, and cost (else a MacBook might make more sense).
From my experience it feels like the "de facto" server choice for CICD jobs that can specify. I don't know why that is, possibly just that it's widely available.
Ubuntu do a lot of work bundling proprietary drivers I think- probably the reason a bunch of popular distros are built on top of it (pop-os, elementary, mint)
I use it for work (and a homelab). For me, it's got more up-to-date versions of software than Debian and it's easy to search for solutions to issues as it's got a large user base.
I'm not a fan of the various redhat/centos distros as I've had issues in the past with RPM based distributions. It's possible to have problems with DEB based systems, but in my experience it's a lot easier to fix DEB systems than RPM ones.
Ubuntu is basically a distro for very very experienced Linux users. It's simple to install and then everything just works, so you don't waste time pissing about typing in things from outdated wikis that might have been correct five years ago.
For me it is inertia. I started using Ubuntu back in 2010. It works well enough that I haven‘t bothered to switch. I may finally switch if decide to fill to distro with AI crap.
I used lots of distros including Debian Sid, Arch, SUSE but Kubuntu was my first love and eventually I ended up with Kubuntu LTS , i no longer enjoy optimzing my kernel, bootspeed or other stuff, I hate GNOME philosophy so KDE was always my love. I run LTS since I do not want to run the latest bugs.
People switching or upgrading from soon-EoL versions beware:
Ubuntu now defaults to uutils, which are reimplementations of GNU utils that deliberately do attempt to not read the original source (to be legally cleared to not comply with its copyleft expectations). The "correct" behavior is not always evident from POSIX, so uutils is by design an imperfect imitation with a long way to go for bug-by-bug compatibility.
While most data loss severity bugs reported in the 25.10 round of testing [1] have been resolved, the sheer volume of unexpected breakage suggests that there are more to be discovered. Most impacted are unit tests and shell scripts that expect some utility to return syscall errors in stderr and propagate it to a non-zero exit code, where on Ubuntu 26.04 they might silently swallow (apparent, partial or complete) failure to execute the requested action.
(Also, uutils binaries are ridiculously large, but this is not such big deal: Ubuntu has for many years already built rather large initramfs and has yet to make progress in automatically detecting which firmware blobs cannot possibly be needed on a given system. I did run into an "undersized" partition layout because of Rust duplication.. but only on systems upgraded from ancient times before this was the norm.)
On a more positive note, the thing that causes me some temporary pain might still be awesome for the long-term success of GNU/Linux (or whatever we shall call it now, still looking for an updated pasta[1] recipe). As much as it was a little too early a little too move fast break stuff, I applaud Ubuntu for demanding the drop-in-replacement to be possible.
To get where they are now, uutils needed to do the thing nobody bothered to do for 30 years: proper cli unit tests, the kind with which you can compare busybox/toybox/GNU/uutils/Darwin without depending on implementation details [2]. This will net more future good than current harm. Even if the tools cannot be changed to have fewer nonsensical edge cases for compatibility reasons, at least now I can ask $currentLLM to write me a better manpage, one that includes the gotchas [3] and factual errors that the 1996 (partly updated in 2004) version still fails. And improve shellcheck so even those among future generations that still need the shell as we know it today are not bitten by its warts as much.
I installed Kubuntu on a laptop for work, since I use KDE at home. It was slightly annoying to have to re-configure stuff like the DE settings, Dolphin etc though.
Anyone have suggestions for syncing/version controlling KDE Plasma 6 configurations?
When I was trying to go upstream having used Pop!_OS for a while, I installed Kubuntu first and even though the install went through, the distro had problems getting to the desktop after post-install reboot. Even though my laptop is a Thinkpad which is supposed to be very well supported. I took this as a sign of things to come and shrugged off my hangover of rpm hell(!) and tried with Fedora+KDE instead. Best decision I made. I have been using it for a few months now and experience has been absolutely seamless and smooth sailing - highly recommended.
The versions are all pinned to the ones picked for the April release. The .1 at the end is just a grace period so people don't get update prompts in case there are bugs in the .04 release.
> TPM-backed full-disk encryption is now generally available in the Ubuntu installer. By tying encryption to the TPM security chip, disk encryption is bound to a specific device, significantly raising the bar for physical access attacks while improving the user experience.
That's great, but they are also intending to comply with the OS-level age verification [1]. Initial implementations will somehow be privacy protecting, but eventually the temptation to tie a specific person to an OS fingerprint will become too great.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rk4fj7/ubun...
How long until I can selectively tell certain websites I'm a child so they stop showing me ads?
They wanted the personal computer to store and report personal information. I hope they have their best surprised faces ready for when computers report what the owner wants them to report.
That is only possible when you really are the owner. And the amount of device out there in the world where people really are the owner is rather small. (Just the Linux desktops and the GrapheneOS smartphones, etc.)
You are not quite the owner on GrapheneOS either, because of Android Key Attestation (which has functionality analogous to desktop TPMs). If you re-unlock your bootloader (say, to run a custom build of GrapheneOS), attestation will snitch on you and the subset of apps that use key attestation to require a locked bootloader and/or enforce an AVB key allowlist will not work properly. This is a very small subset of apps currently, but I don't see it getting any smaller.
GrapheneOS does everything and more for key attestation, allowing security sensitive applications to test the integrity of the device. Sadly some apps like google wallet not only check for attestation, but check if Google's signed it. Which is against the idea of attestation in the first place.
So google's tap to pay doesn't work, but others do, like garmin pay. Random bank apps are hit and miss.
> GrapheneOS does everything and more for key attestation
Right, that's the problem, in my opinion. I'm not referring to the apps that require Google's keys only, I'm referring to the ones that allow GrapheneOS keys too. If you use one of these apps, you can use vanilla GrapheneOS builds, but you cannot run your own self-signed builds.
You are gaining freedom relative to running Google's OS, but you are still not free to further modify the software running on your own device.
Apps that require "integrity" should monitor their own integrity only, they should not attempt to infer the integrity of their environment.
Trick is there's no integrity without the OS. Cheats can ruin games, keyloggers can record passwords, music/movies can be stolen, bitcoins can be stolen, etc.
Attestation does not solve this.
You can never own a device with a cellular modem. They can all provide backdoor access regardless of the primary OS.
It is possible to build a device where the modem is not at all trusted, but I don't know if anyone is actually doing that.
The fewer devices doing it, the more effective it will be for those who do it.
Dont ask permission.
Run firefox with Ublock Origin and all blocks turned on. Add Sponsorblock to block in-video sponsor crap on Youtube.
Run Bypass Paywalls Clean from https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_uploads
Is there a good combo that works with spotify web?
I will never feel bad about blocking ads on youtube, because they have an effective monopoly on distribution of certain content. But when it comes to music, why not just use something else?
I recommend buying your own CDs (at your local music store, directly from the band when you attend their concerts, or on Bandcamp/Discogs), ripping them, and putting them on the local file system of your MP3 player, phone, your car’s SD card, etc. Sometimes if you buy a vinyl record it comes with a convenient download code, and if it doesn’t digital albums are very cheap on Bandcamp.
I also recommend tuning regularly onto your favorite radio station (mine is KEXP Seattle; and Rás 2 in Iceland) particularly when they have live performance to discover new music.
Piracy.
I have been experimenting with self hosting Navidrome for that purpose.
And as always, it deserves to be stressed that Sponsorblock is far more than the name suggests. It can also skip sections like intros, tangents, etc - and it's configurable per channel.
If you're listening to a music playlist on YouTube, this removes interruptions caused by the pointless intro and outro screens added to songs.
How is that even remotely related?
The Linux implementation I've seen is the Freedesktop implementation that just responds to a user profile flag. There's no cryptography involved, it's just like asking for a room number like the adduser command does.
Edit: well except American states don't flag your operating system as illegal unless they ask for your room number. Canonical and all the other Linux companies really like being able to make money and not spend all of their earnings on lawyers.
Ubuntu has become the bloatware distro I've grown to dislike. Luckily with a CLI-based AI, one can choose any Linux flavor and customize it to their liking.
Does anyone know of some good scripts or workflows to install Ubuntu (because it 'just works' e.g. comes with a lot of drivers) and then scale back to a Debian-like experience?
I've had issues starting with Debian because it doesn't ship with broad support for wifi hardware, and internet over USB to iphone hotspot also didn't work. The only option was to get wired ethernet to bring up wifi.
As of Debian 12, they should include the non-free firmware by default, and even before that you didn't have to jump through a lot of hoops to add support
Also, one of the better uses of AI is fixing your Ubuntu distro (presumably not the only one) when it becomes unusable after an upgrade due to replacing your Nvidia drivers or somesuch.
I've installed Ubuntu 26.04 on a desktop I had lying around and things just work. It had 24.04 before, and the update barely registered as a concern. That desktop also ran Windows, and Ubuntu was incomparably snappy, to the point I felt that my typing speed was the bottleneck.
What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.
> What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.
I've had to use Claude multiple times to fix my Ubuntu distro when an upgrade causes some part of it to stop working, and this Snap/APT mishmash sometimes confuses it too: "you need the Snap version. I was wrong you need the APT version. I was wrong you need to build from source..". Gets there in the end if you give it a bit of help.
> Luckily with a CLI-based AI, one can choose...
One can choose any Linux distro that has good installation and operator's instructions, such as Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Red Hat, etc, etc, etc, and follow those instructions.
It might be hard for some youngsters and hypesters to believe, but novices were installing and operating Linux on their home computers long before LLM research even began.
im out of the loop here, whats the last sentence referring to?
Slop born of plagiarism. People would rather read a pastiche of documentation than the actual documentation.
I don't think people are using Claude to read docs to them, rather modifying their system for them.
im still confused, i was asking about how a cli based ai allows you to choose any linux flavor and customize. i dont understand how slop documentation answers that?
I think the poster just meant that whatever distro you choose, you don't have to stick with the default desktop and look and feel if you don't like it. If you are brave enough, then give your agentic AI CLI access. Personally I just ask AI on my phone and pick and choose from the advice.
Or, you know, you can read the documentation and actually learn how to use your system. It isn't hard, dude.
I'm curious what the audience is for Ubuntu nowadays? If you use it - why Ubuntu over another distro? Is it still largely a beginner-friendly stepping stone?
I use it because I am very happy with the release schedule and the maturity. I don't want to use the latest greatest. I want something that works and has some manpower (and maybe money) behind it. I am not the biggest fan of snap but I know how to get around it.
May I suggest Debian? It's 90+% the same as Ubuntu, and is updated about as often as Ubuntu LTS, but no snaps.
This is genuinely what I'd answer to almost every comment in this thread.
For parent: Debian's release cycle is great, on top of letting you choose a degree of stability with one word: https://www.debian.org/releases/
> letting you choose a degree of stability with one word
Debian Sid: the original rolling release distro.
I usually don't use LTS. Debian release cycle is too long for me.
Considered any alternatives? Like atomic OS images, e.g. Fedora derivatives?
I don't like immutable distros. I play around too much. I tried normal Fedora but an update broke my graphics stack and I didn't like that. Other than that I am used to Deb and it just works.
Like most things, I imagine there are multiple audiences for Ubuntu. But for me:
- Inertia, I've used it for a long time.
- It's based on Debian. I like Debian and use it on servers.
- I chose it originally because it had better desktop support than Debian. It's possible that Debian is now also good, but see above...inertia.
- It (mostly) just works on a wide range of hardware, whilst remaining up-to-date with the latest Linux developments.
- I like the release cycles. Debian stable is too stable. Arch/Fedora/Debian-testing are too volatile. Ubuntu allows me to choose whether to follow the 9-month support window of a normal release; or the 5-year window of the LTS.
Everything above is highly subjective and by no means are other preferences invalid. All Linux distros are awesome in their own unique way.
I used to run Arch out of engineering school (that's what we used there), and loved it. But as I started working on my business, I started having less time to simply configure my OS and fight it on a few things. The breaking point for me, when I switched to Ubuntu Desktop, was not being able to connect to my two monitors via a dock (2 display ports). It simply took too much of my time to figure out all the nuances of evdi between my Thinkpad and my Dell monitors - Ubuntu just...worked (I could have spent more time understanding the issue, but I just needed it to work) But as I get older and am starting to rethink my tech stack, I'm strongly considering going back to my dear Arch
I use it because I like how it looks, it has sane defaults and is reliable. I am an "LTS to LTS" type person. My desktop pretty much looks like the default screenshots. Most of my customization comes through scripts and tools that I can install quickly after a reimage. Not a beginner.
I first touched it around 2010 and didn't like the desktop environment. Someone showed me the different flavors and I settled on XFCE (Xubuntu). I'm still using an Ubuntu flavor just for its APT repository. I'm of the unsubstantiated belief that if a distro has a large userbase, it will have a better maintained repository, so I will probably never leave.
I had a programming class just as Ubuntu was getting started, and the instructor gave us live CDs. I toyed with it for a few months, but went back to Windows.
A few years later (2008-ish), my college issued everybody Thinkpads. The default solution to nearly every problem was "re-image". Strangely, the images they used still had the 4-ish GB OEM recovery partition. I had enough insight to know they didn't use it. After searching for a user-friendly distro that could fit in 4GB, I settled on Xubuntu. I've since moved away from it (and Ubuntu in general), but not XFCE.
I'm mostly a MacOS user now, but my Linux box is Ubuntu because that's just what I've been using. It's what I know, it's stable and just does what I want.
It used to be my "it just works" distro for systems I didn't want to spend time configuring, but they managed to make me feel like a second-class citizen as a not-enterprise-customer (not really anything specific, just a lot of small cuts).
I appreciate that they're running a business, but the Fedora/RHEL split feels much cleaner, and Fedora is my current go-to in instances where I used to reach for Ubuntu. (Or I use Debian, for headless/server setups)
Ubuntu Just Works and makes you update your OS once every five years if you use the free plan, ten years if you're not a business and use a free account, and even longer if you're a company. Not even Microsoft offers that.
It's also the reference OS for tons of free software out there.
At some point you just want something that works and is somewhat familiar, so sticking with a distro makes sense even when it becomes somewhat annoying.
I remember the early days of Linux when I'd be using a dial-up modem to overnight download Linus' hot-off-the-press kernel tarballs to build myself and update my system ... nowadays I just want a working computer with minimum fuss, and cost (else a MacBook might make more sense).
From my experience it feels like the "de facto" server choice for CICD jobs that can specify. I don't know why that is, possibly just that it's widely available.
Ubuntu do a lot of work bundling proprietary drivers I think- probably the reason a bunch of popular distros are built on top of it (pop-os, elementary, mint)
Hardware support.
Where do you not get hardware support? Many, many distros work out of box nearly everywhere.
Clueless companies with clueless IT departments that want someone to call when things break.
For the rest Ubuntu's only reason for being is that it's the basis of many good distros like Linux Mint.
I'm using lubuntu, but it just works, stable, solid, widespread support. no notes, no complaints
If you are on nvidia Jetson, Ubuntu is basically a necessity.
Fedora IoT seems to advertise support for it. Have not tested it yet but I am very tempted.
I like multipass.
Personally because DGX OS is forked from it and DGX Software Stack is supported out of the box. This is a dual 6000 Blackwell machine.
Other machines in the house are Mint.
i run it in wsl, main appeal is that I mostly run things on debian servers at work so I always feel at home when developing stuff
I use it for work (and a homelab). For me, it's got more up-to-date versions of software than Debian and it's easy to search for solutions to issues as it's got a large user base.
I'm not a fan of the various redhat/centos distros as I've had issues in the past with RPM based distributions. It's possible to have problems with DEB based systems, but in my experience it's a lot easier to fix DEB systems than RPM ones.
Ubuntu is basically a distro for very very experienced Linux users. It's simple to install and then everything just works, so you don't waste time pissing about typing in things from outdated wikis that might have been correct five years ago.
For me it is inertia. I started using Ubuntu back in 2010. It works well enough that I haven‘t bothered to switch. I may finally switch if decide to fill to distro with AI crap.
For engineering, most cloud VMs run Ubuntu/Debian.
Having it also on the desktop makes things, less compatibility issues.
> I'm curious what the audience is for Ubuntu nowadays? If you use it - why Ubuntu over another distro?
I would frame this the other way around. Why would anyone pick any other distro over Debian or Ubuntu?
Has the most packages, with the least quality of packaging.
Ubuntu for experimentation with Robotics/ROS2. Windows for experimentation with FPGA/Vivado. A dual-boot 14" Lenovo E14 to host the festivities.
I used lots of distros including Debian Sid, Arch, SUSE but Kubuntu was my first love and eventually I ended up with Kubuntu LTS , i no longer enjoy optimzing my kernel, bootspeed or other stuff, I hate GNOME philosophy so KDE was always my love. I run LTS since I do not want to run the latest bugs.
The audience is people that haven't realized that Ubuntu lost its way +10 years ago.
Where did everyone else go?
Back to Debian. It caught up where it matters.
People switching or upgrading from soon-EoL versions beware: Ubuntu now defaults to uutils, which are reimplementations of GNU utils that deliberately do attempt to not read the original source (to be legally cleared to not comply with its copyleft expectations). The "correct" behavior is not always evident from POSIX, so uutils is by design an imperfect imitation with a long way to go for bug-by-bug compatibility.
While most data loss severity bugs reported in the 25.10 round of testing [1] have been resolved, the sheer volume of unexpected breakage suggests that there are more to be discovered. Most impacted are unit tests and shell scripts that expect some utility to return syscall errors in stderr and propagate it to a non-zero exit code, where on Ubuntu 26.04 they might silently swallow (apparent, partial or complete) failure to execute the requested action.
(Also, uutils binaries are ridiculously large, but this is not such big deal: Ubuntu has for many years already built rather large initramfs and has yet to make progress in automatically detecting which firmware blobs cannot possibly be needed on a given system. I did run into an "undersized" partition layout because of Rust duplication.. but only on systems upgraded from ancient times before this was the norm.)
[1]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues?q=is%3Aissue+%28l...
On a more positive note, the thing that causes me some temporary pain might still be awesome for the long-term success of GNU/Linux (or whatever we shall call it now, still looking for an updated pasta[1] recipe). As much as it was a little too early a little too move fast break stuff, I applaud Ubuntu for demanding the drop-in-replacement to be possible.
To get where they are now, uutils needed to do the thing nobody bothered to do for 30 years: proper cli unit tests, the kind with which you can compare busybox/toybox/GNU/uutils/Darwin without depending on implementation details [2]. This will net more future good than current harm. Even if the tools cannot be changed to have fewer nonsensical edge cases for compatibility reasons, at least now I can ask $currentLLM to write me a better manpage, one that includes the gotchas [3] and factual errors that the 1996 (partly updated in 2004) version still fails. And improve shellcheck so even those among future generations that still need the shell as we know it today are not bitten by its warts as much.
[1]: https://safereddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/av4rl9/what_your... [2]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking [3]: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-gotchas.html
This update came out over a month ago...
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-26-04-1-lts-released/8...
This is for the .1 release which allows you to upgrade from the previous LTS.
I had the prompt on my work machine this morning which was previously running 24.04.x and is now on 26.04.1.
yes but this announcement is presumably about it being ungated for `do-release-upgrade` commands from existing 24.04 LTS installations.
You couldn't have upgraded from 24.04 to 26.04?
I installed Kubuntu on a laptop for work, since I use KDE at home. It was slightly annoying to have to re-configure stuff like the DE settings, Dolphin etc though.
Anyone have suggestions for syncing/version controlling KDE Plasma 6 configurations?
(I made an Ask HN for it as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49910250)
When I was trying to go upstream having used Pop!_OS for a while, I installed Kubuntu first and even though the install went through, the distro had problems getting to the desktop after post-install reboot. Even though my laptop is a Thinkpad which is supposed to be very well supported. I took this as a sign of things to come and shrugged off my hangover of rpm hell(!) and tried with Fedora+KDE instead. Best decision I made. I have been using it for a few months now and experience has been absolutely seamless and smooth sailing - highly recommended.
This must be the first time I see the Falkland Islands represented in one of these generic globe renders, go on you Ubuntu...
The actual changelog can be found at https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.04/1/
What's with the ".04" in the version numbers?
[year].[month].[patch]
ubuntu does two releases in a year, one in april (26.04) and one in october (26.10 on october 15)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history
It came out in April. Their LTS releases always come out in April of even numbered years.
But the "final" LTS release is always in August, so maybe they should also have a .08
The versions are all pinned to the ones picked for the April release. The .1 at the end is just a grace period so people don't get update prompts in case there are bugs in the .04 release.
It's a patch release, therefore the .1 suffix.
yy.mm
What happened to Ubuntu Core Desktop the snap-only atomic version?
It's the release month, so 26.04 is April 2026. 26.10 lands in October.
.1 point release is when autoupgrade becomes available to 24.04 users and is usually roughly 3 months after April (.04) release).
> It's the release month, so 26.04 is April 2026. 26.10 lands in October.
26.04 is an LTS release, 26.10 will not be.