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.

Feel free to ask me anything about it!
@jorge Could you expand on "The terminal talks to the LXC api directly, there's no middle layer. This is basically what I want project exo". Is the terminal running in a distrobox-like environment by default? What is Project Exo?

@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

Project Exo: Ideas for a cloud-native terminal · ublue-os · Discussion #156

(This is labelled as a concept, which is an inprogress idea or proposal, it is not resourced or scoped so mostly just a collection of ideas. Over time it might move to a proposal) Hey everyone, I'v...

GitHub
@that_leaflet @jorge This is the terminbal app he's talking about: https://github.com/canonical/workshops -- there's a few screenshots in the readme. It's available as a snap, so you can test it independently of Core Desktop.
GitHub - canonical/workshops: Workshops

Workshops. Contribute to canonical/workshops development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub
@jamesh @that_leaflet Hah, all in the open the entire time too, well played. 😀
@jorge Where can we find the image for it? Does anything special need to be done to launch it?
@that_leaflet No clue I only got to see the laptop, people should go look because the terminal was open this entire time and no one noticed it.
@jorge Can we use flatpak and appimage on Ubuntu core?
@Hashrack I didn't ask, this is for people who don't care about that and just want a finished end product.
@jorge I already looked for a bit but haven't found the image. Where can we find it?

@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.