> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 default 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 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.)
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...
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.
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
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.
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 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)
For the rest Ubuntu's only reason for being is that it's the basis of many good distros like Linux Mint.
I would frame this the other way around. Why would anyone pick any other distro over Debian or Ubuntu?
Other machines in the house are Mint.
Having it also on the desktop makes things, less compatibility issues.
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.)
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-26-04-1-lts-released/8...
I had the prompt on my work machine this morning which was previously running 24.04.x and is now on 26.04.1.
26.04 is an LTS release, 26.10 will not be.
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