Ubuntu Core Desktop, the Ubuntu variant that has everything built as Snap, was revived yesterday. Canonical announced:
Canonical announced a developer preview of Core Desktop in 2023, but the project has since been dormant. I’m thrilled to announce that the development of Ubuntu Core Desktop has restarted with a dedicated, cross-functional team working toward three well-defined initial use cases.
Ubuntu Core is Canonical’s “immutable Linux” distribution. The boot-loader, the kernel, desktop environment, and all applications are built as Snap that run in sandbox.
System files are read-only and unchangeable. For applications, users has the control of camera, microphone, home directory, etc permissions access as they are isolated in sandboxes.
It’s harder to break and easy to recover, and ideal for users who require a highly reliable and stable operating system.
Snap app permission access control
The initial development of Ubuntu Core Desktop is focused on three use cases.
- The browser-centric machine, allows to handle daily tasks using web apps and cloud services.
- The developer workstation, for software engineering and application development.
- The game machine.
The Snap only Ubuntu Core aims to be the future of Ubuntu, though the traditional .deb build system will continue to exist.
So far, there are over 11,000 snap app packages published in snap store. But for everyday consumer users, there’re still tons of software packages available as Deb, Flatpak or AppImage, but NOT snap.
For these non-Snap applications, Canonical recommends to run them inside background containers (e.g., LXD), while Ubuntu Core works to integrate them to feel like native apps.
And, for more about the Ubuntu Core Desktop, just the discussion in this Ubuntu Discourse page.
Try out Ubuntu Core Desktop
So far, there’s Ubuntu Core Desktop ISO image available for end users yet, though embedded, IoT, and edge devices can try out Ubuntu Core by going to ubuntu.com/download/core.
And, community contributors can visit github.com/canonical/core-base-desktop for requests and bug reports.
