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 ...
@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
Diogo Constantino