> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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)
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 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'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.
People switching or upgrading from soon-EoL versions beware:
Ubuntu now default to uutils, which are reimplementations of GNU utils that deliberately do not 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 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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
> 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.
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 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 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.
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)
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 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'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.
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.
Hardware support.
I like multipass.
> 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?
The audience is people that haven't realized that Ubuntu lost its way +10 years ago.
Where did everyone else go?
People switching or upgrading from soon-EoL versions beware: Ubuntu now default to uutils, which are reimplementations of GNU utils that deliberately do not 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 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.)
This update came out over a month ago...
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-26-04-1-lts-released/8...
yes but this announcement is presumably about it being ungated for `do-release-upgrade` commands from existing 24.04 LTS installations.
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.
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.
This must be the first time I see the Falkland Islands represented in one of these generic globe renders, go on you Ubuntu...
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.
yy.mm