Hi all I’m Tim the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu Desktop. I think the headline here may have embellished my original post, so if you’re interested, you can find it here [1].
Ubuntu is (almost) 20 years young! As I am sure you can appreciate that means a long history of technical changes. We’re looking to modernise the desktop. We started with 23.04 when we moved from Ubiquity to Subiquity, the Ubuntu Server installer, unifying our tech stack to create a more coherent installation experience across Ubuntu Server and Desktop. We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent).
Still, we need to be bolder. In fact we shouldn’t be talking about the installer nearly so much; it's a tool not the destination. I want to improve the installation through the first boot experience so we can move onto more interesting things. We’re exploring a range of changes to get this part right: from declarative configs to answering the question “what does security by default” mean in 2023? In the context of this headline, and to make our intentions clear, we are looking to minimise the default installation. So the plan is to have one lean installation option.
It's late in the UK so I’m going to sign off and be back at this in the morning. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what an awesome out-of-box-experience could look like (either here or in the original discourse post).
> We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent).
I'm an Ubuntu fan. With that said, I agree that GTK tooling could definitely be better. However, rather than branching off to Flutter, I would much rather see Canonical unite around GNOME technologies and use Vala/GTK.
In a broader sense, I believe Ubuntu is branching off too much and in a number of ways. I myself, and several users I know, have left Ubuntu after the decision to push Snaps so heavily. Flatpak has a number of advantages, and I believe Canonical's efforts would be better spent helping to improve Flatpak rather than building a competing product.
Fundamentally, I believe Ubuntu's vision should be a Debian derivative whose system is updated via aptitude/dpkg on the awesome interim/LTS release schedule that made Ubuntu great. Userspace apps, on the other hand, can and probably should be sandboxed in the form of Flatpaks, which would provide rolling releases and system isolation. With the combined efforts of Canonical and the rest of the community centered on Flatpak, much could be gained.
Ubuntu Desktop, being a desktop distribution, should choose one desktop environment and embrace it wholeheartedly. With GNOME being the environment of choice, I believe Ubuntu should ship GNOME's core apps by default (https://apps.gnome.org/) and no more, no less. Along this vein of thought, while it's cute to have a rebranded version of GNOME software and call it the "Snap Store", that honestly feels tangential. Instead, Ubuntu should use a mostly vanilla GNOME software center (and not a renamed one), and as I said above, switch the Ubuntu ecosystem from Snaps to Flatpak.
Ubuntu was great not when it was different, but when it provided stable, sane defaults that "just worked."
I’m in an interesting scenario because I actually use a Linux desktop at work (working on Linux platform devices so having your desktop be able to run buildroot and/or the software directly is useful and IT likes Ubuntu) and it’s honestly a very good OOB experience as is atm, the main changes I would make for casual users would be fleshing out the store more and removing reliance on snaps, apt auto installing snaps has caused me way more problems than it has solved and while I think snap is fine it shouldn’t do things unless I try to use it directly because it doesn’t play very nicely with apt. Also I think you’re overestimating how much people actually want bold changes, we’re using Ubuntu 20.04 because 22.04 changed too many things and many packages we use don’t work.
unattended fleet VMs with common AUTH linked to billing, none of which is run by me, does not look like the same security as my computer, my choice , Sir
I can sympathize with the technical concern, but really? We shouldn't talk like that to people willing to come here and discuss their decisions. It'll just prevent people from doing so in the future.
The reply was too kind and I'm glad they held back; Ubuntu needs to understand that we're abandoning it primarily for concerns about their technical reasoning. "What the fuck is their going on with their decision making process" is exactly the problem.
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Our current focus is privacy preserving digital ads - a needed fix for an industry built on questionable consumer data practices. To deliver this, we are building a cross functional team spanning software engineering, data science, data engineering, dev ops, blockchain, and programmatic advertising all wrapped within a performant distributed system.
Glimpse is backed by ConsenSys, Founders Factory, Guardian Media Group Ventures, Innovate UK, Nesta, and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Ubuntu is (almost) 20 years young! As I am sure you can appreciate that means a long history of technical changes. We’re looking to modernise the desktop. We started with 23.04 when we moved from Ubiquity to Subiquity, the Ubuntu Server installer, unifying our tech stack to create a more coherent installation experience across Ubuntu Server and Desktop. We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent).
Still, we need to be bolder. In fact we shouldn’t be talking about the installer nearly so much; it's a tool not the destination. I want to improve the installation through the first boot experience so we can move onto more interesting things. We’re exploring a range of changes to get this part right: from declarative configs to answering the question “what does security by default” mean in 2023? In the context of this headline, and to make our intentions clear, we are looking to minimise the default installation. So the plan is to have one lean installation option.
It's late in the UK so I’m going to sign off and be back at this in the morning. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what an awesome out-of-box-experience could look like (either here or in the original discourse post).
Best, Tim
[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rethinking-ubuntu-desktop-a-m...