Ubuntu Core Desktop will not be released alongside Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in April, as originally hoped.
For those thinking “wait, what?!” — last year Canonical announced it was building an all-snap, immutable version of Ubuntu for home users called Ubuntu Core Desktop.
Further, it was aiming to make the first version available to download in April of this year, alongside the regular Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release.
It wasn’t going to be default, more of a formal, public preview release.
But those plans have changed:
[Ubuntu Core Desktop] won’t be released by 24.04, and unfortunately, I can’t provide a date until we’ve worked through issues that need resolution – we want the user experience to be excellent and that’s going to take time.
Tim Holmes-Mittra, Canonical
Canonical doesn’t go into details about what specific issues need resolving. One imagines, given that the first Ubuntu Core Desktop release was going to be a preview and not a recommended download, it’s a myriad bugs/difficulties — ones not easily sorted.
Which I think any reasonable person would expect, right?
Building an immutable, snap-based Ubuntu desktop was never going to a trivial task. Delays, bumps, snafus were all-but guaranteed to emerge along the way. It would’ve been weirded if they hadn’t!
I’ve tried dev builds of Ubuntu Core Desktop a few times — I wrote a guide on where to find the images last June, if you’re interested — and progress appears brisk. The overall experience as it comes is surprisingly usable – not perfect, but trending there.
But there certainly is room for improvement, especially in accommodating non-OOTB use cases.
Figure I’d pass on word of this (hopefully temporary) postponement on.
Thanks Kamen
