I've got some awesome news for #linux folks today! @kenvandine dropped by my house on his way to Mackinac island and I got the full tour of #ubuntu core desktop. The TLDR is. It is not just good, it's looking _great_, and the better news is that it's the same model.
Which by the way, is available as a public image, people just haven't found it and realized you can splat it onto a disk. Everything I will talk about in this thread is all public, no secrets. Here's the lowdown:
The terminal experience is the same model as say distrobox, but it's built on lxc as you'd expect. The terminal is brand new, built using Flutter, and it looks native, I thought it was gtk.
There's a gui with the logos of each distro when you click it, with the ubuntu logo being the larger default, and then after setup the terminal just takes you there, similar to distrobox.
Here's boot on an xps 13:
The entire gnome session is sandboxed, and apps talk to the things in your CLI via the snap plugs (or whatever they call it, sorry my terminology might be wrong).
This session has no "classic" mode, but the classic vscode runs fine and can connect to the lxc container for dev work.
The desktop sessions can run on top of the base system, which will be based on core LTSes, so 22, 24, 26, and then the desktop can run on a channel so you can run different versions of GNOME let's say.
And then sessions like KDE, etc and be on the same system and they also run in a sandboxed environment, so the entire desktop itself is like this.
Most of the old apps you hate won't be coming with, they'll be replaced with flutter versions, so no more old update manager.
No gnome software, they are rolling with the community made snap store thing.
Resource usage is better than with classic ubuntu by a measurable amount, and you can tell on observation almost immediately, it's not as jank as usual.
The base system will stick to LTSes but you'll be able to select your kernel channel from the usual suspects, so stock, HWE, etc.
And then certain components you can rev differently, so LTS base, with a newer kernel + mesa is how they'll do gaming support.
The terminal talks to the LXC api directly, there's no middle layer.
This is basically what I want project exo to be but they built it already with lxc and flutter.
The docker/podman experience is currently nonexistant. Your docker experience will be via the docker snap, which .. ok that's a choice, sure ...
Overall summary is, you really can't tell it's ubuntu core, which is what they're going for, sort of like how you can't tell I'm not using normal Fedora.
I pretty much agree with the model choices here, implementation details not so much, but ubuntu is moving faster than people think, the company is profitable and makes money _on the desktop product_, so it is funded.
So if you like #ubuntu it's pretty nice. No commitment on when other than what they've said already.
Was also happy to hear that they will be coming back to supporting ZFS better, which made me really happy. cc @jimsalter
"So I can get ZFS root on this laptop then?" wasn't answered, but you can tell they want to do it, it's plate juggling at this point.
@that_leaflet Yeah there's no "distrobox but it's for LXC". The flutter terminal app-to-lxc communication is all API driven.
Exo is the next thing @marco and I want to build, having the terminal just natively support containers without host interaction with direct communication to the container runtime: https://github.com/orgs/ublue-os/discussions/156
@DiogoConstantino In the actions tab, go into one of the build jobs and the artifact is at the bottom.
I can think of a fine British gentleman who will find a way to make it real easy for everyone to play with it.
@jimsalter Oh I'm sorry man, I always associated you with Ars and ZFS.
Well then, fresh 2.5 Admins content then!
@jimsalter And you'll dig this, we can do custom derivatives of CoreOS, so that means we can have atomic servers with ZFS with exactly what you want on it running out of a git repo, it's awesome.
@jorge that sounds very interesting. Can you follow up in mid-July? I'm overwhelmed right now dealing with the fallout from Reddit's CEO being an entitled dipshit. :)
I'm scheduled to get a new Discourse instance up for our community on Jul 1 and I'm sure that'll be nuts for the first week or two, but I'd really like to get involved with your project once some of the dust settles.
@jimsalter I am on like year 4 of "This won't take long" so I can be patient lol.
Being on your radar is enough!
@jorge unrelatedly... When I'm reading your first name in my head, should I be hearing phonetic English "George" or phonetic Spanish/Portuguese "Jorge?"
I always assumed the latter, but my treacherous brain is trying to tell me I've heard you introduced as the former, so I figured I'd better ask. 🙃
@DiogoConstantino It's at a minimum going to be 2024 before this hits GA but my initial reaction to the ability to run normal docker/oci containers was not a good one. 😀
But I'm not sweating that because I think the userbase will make that clear.
Jorge Castro
Leaflet
James Henstridge
Hashrack
Diogo Constantino
Jim Salter