> TPM-backed full-disk encryption is now generally available in the Ubuntu installer. By tying encryption to the TPM security chip, disk encryption is bound to a specific device, significantly raising the bar for physical access attacks while improving the user experience.
That's great, but they are also intending to comply with the OS-level age verification [1]. Initial implementations will somehow be privacy protecting, but eventually the temptation to tie a specific person to an OS fingerprint will become too great.
How long until I can selectively tell certain websites I'm a child so they stop showing me ads?
They wanted the personal computer to store and report personal information. I hope they have their best surprised faces ready for when computers report what the owner wants them to report.
That is only possible when you really are the owner. And the amount of device out there in the world where people really are the owner is rather small. (Just the Linux desktops and the GrapheneOS smartphones, etc.)
You are not quite the owner on GrapheneOS either, because of Android Key Attestation (which has functionality analogous to desktop TPMs). If you re-unlock your bootloader (say, to run a custom build of GrapheneOS), attestation will snitch on you and the subset of apps that use key attestation to require a locked bootloader and/or enforce an AVB key allowlist will not work properly. This is a very small subset of apps currently, but I don't see it getting any smaller.
I will never feel bad about blocking ads on youtube, because they have an effective monopoly on distribution of certain content. But when it comes to music, why not just use something else?
And as always, it deserves to be stressed that Sponsorblock is far more than the name suggests. It can also skip sections like intros, tangents, etc - and it's configurable per channel.
If you're listening to a music playlist on YouTube, this removes interruptions caused by the pointless intro and outro screens added to songs.
The Linux implementation I've seen is the Freedesktop implementation that just responds to a user profile flag. There's no cryptography involved, it's just like asking for a room number like the adduser command does.
Edit: well except American states don't flag your operating system as illegal unless they ask for your room number. Canonical and all the other Linux companies really like being able to make money and not spend all of their earnings on lawyers.
Ubuntu has become the bloatware distro I've grown to dislike. Luckily with a CLI-based AI, one can choose any Linux flavor and customize it to their liking.
Does anyone know of some good scripts or workflows to install Ubuntu (because it 'just works' e.g. comes with a lot of drivers) and then scale back to a Debian-like experience?
I've had issues starting with Debian because it doesn't ship with broad support for wifi hardware, and internet over USB to iphone hotspot also didn't work. The only option was to get wired ethernet to bring up wifi.
As of Debian 12, they should include the non-free firmware by default, and even before that you didn't have to jump through a lot of hoops to add support
Also, one of the better uses of AI is fixing your Ubuntu distro (presumably not the only one) when it becomes unusable after an upgrade due to replacing your Nvidia drivers or somesuch.
im still confused, i was asking about how a cli based ai allows you to choose any linux flavor and customize. i dont understand how slop documentation answers that?
I think the poster just meant that whatever distro you choose, you don't have to stick with the default desktop and look and feel if you don't like it. If you are brave enough, then give your agentic AI CLI access. Personally I just ask AI on my phone and pick and choose from the advice.
I've installed Ubuntu 26.04 on a desktop I had lying around and things just work. It had 24.04 before, and the update barely registered as a concern. That desktop also ran Windows, and Ubuntu was incomparably snappy, to the point I felt that my typing speed was the bottleneck.
What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.
> What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.
I've had to use Claude multiple times to fix my Ubuntu distro when an upgrade causes some part of it to stop working, and this Snap/APT mishmash sometimes confuses it too: "you need the Snap version. I was wrong you need the APT version. I was wrong you need to build from source..". Gets there in the end if you give it a bit of help.
One can choose any Linux distro that has good installation and operator's instructions, such as Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Red Hat, etc, etc, etc, and follow those instructions.
It might be hard for some youngsters and hypesters to believe, but novices were installing and operating Linux on their home computers long before LLM research even began.
I'm curious what the audience is for Ubuntu nowadays? If you use it - why Ubuntu over another distro? Is it still largely a beginner-friendly stepping stone?
I use it because I am very happy with the release schedule and the maturity. I don't want to use the latest greatest. I want something that works and has some manpower (and maybe money) behind it. I am not the biggest fan of snap but I know how to get around it.
I used to run Arch out of engineering school (that's what we used there), and loved it. But as I started working on my business, I started having less time to simply configure my OS and fight it on a few things. The breaking point for me, when I switched to Ubuntu Desktop, was not being able to connect to my two monitors via a dock (2 display ports). It simply took too much of my time to figure out all the nuances of evdi between my Thinkpad and my Dell monitors - Ubuntu just...worked (I could have spent more time understanding the issue, but I just needed it to work)
But as I get older and am starting to rethink my tech stack, I'm strongly considering going back to my dear Arch
Like most things, I imagine there are multiple audiences for Ubuntu. But for me:
- Inertia, I've used it for a long time.
- It's based on Debian. I like Debian and use it on servers.
- I chose it originally because it had better desktop support than Debian. It's possible that Debian is now also good, but see above...inertia.
- It (mostly) just works on a wide range of hardware, whilst remaining up-to-date with the latest Linux developments.
- I like the release cycles. Debian stable is too stable. Arch/Fedora/Debian-testing are too volatile. Ubuntu allows me to choose whether to follow the 9-month support window of a normal release; or the 5-year window of the LTS.
Everything above is highly subjective and by no means are other preferences invalid. All Linux distros are awesome in their own unique way.
Ubuntu Just Works and makes you update your OS once every five years if you use the free plan, ten years if you're not a business and use a free account, and even longer if you're a company. Not even Microsoft offers that.
It's also the reference OS for tons of free software out there.
I'm mostly a MacOS user now, but my Linux box is Ubuntu because that's just what I've been using. It's what I know, it's stable and just does what I want.
It used to be my "it just works" distro for systems I didn't want to spend time configuring, but they managed to make me feel like a second-class citizen as a not-enterprise-customer (not really anything specific, just a lot of small cuts).
I appreciate that they're running a business, but the Fedora/RHEL split feels much cleaner, and Fedora is my current go-to in instances where I used to reach for Ubuntu. (Or I use Debian, for headless/server setups)
I first touched it around 2010 and didn't like the desktop environment. Someone showed me the different flavors and I settled on XFCE (Xubuntu). I'm still using an Ubuntu flavor just for its APT repository. I'm of the unsubstantiated belief that if a distro has a large userbase, it will have a better maintained repository, so I will probably never leave.
I had a programming class just as Ubuntu was getting started, and the instructor gave us live CDs. I toyed with it for a few months, but went back to Windows.
A few years later (2008-ish), my college issued everybody Thinkpads. The default solution to nearly every problem was "re-image". Strangely, the images they used still had the 4-ish GB OEM recovery partition. I had enough insight to know they didn't use it. After searching for a user-friendly distro that could fit in 4GB, I settled on Xubuntu. I've since moved away from it (and Ubuntu in general), but not XFCE.
I use it because I like how it looks, it has sane defaults and is reliable. I am an "LTS to LTS" type person. My desktop pretty much looks like the default screenshots. Most of my customization comes through scripts and tools that I can install quickly after a reimage. Not a beginner.
Ubuntu is basically a distro for very very experienced Linux users. It's simple to install and then everything just works, so you don't waste time pissing about typing in things from outdated wikis that might have been correct five years ago.
I used lots of distros including Debian Sid, Arch, SUSE but Kubuntu was my first love and eventually I ended up with Kubuntu LTS , i no longer enjoy optimzing my kernel, bootspeed or other stuff, I hate GNOME philosophy so KDE was always my love. I run LTS since I do not want to run the latest bugs.
People switching or upgrading from soon-EoL versions beware:
Ubuntu now defaults to uutils, which are reimplementations of GNU utils that deliberately do attempt to not read the original source (to be legally cleared to not comply with its copyleft expectations). The "correct" behavior is not always evident from POSIX, so uutils is by design an imperfect imitation with a long way to go for bug-by-bug compatibility.
While most data loss severity bugs reported in the 25.10 round of testing [1] have been resolved, the sheer volume of unexpected breakage suggests that there are more to be discovered. Most impacted are unit tests and shell scripts that expect some utility to return syscall errors in stderr and propagate it to a non-zero exit code, where on Ubuntu 26.04 they might silently swallow (apparent, partial or complete) failure to execute the requested action.
(Also, uutils binaries are ridiculously large, but this is not such big deal: Ubuntu has for many years already built rather large initramfs and has yet to make progress in automatically detecting which firmware blobs cannot possibly be needed on a given system. I did run into an "undersized" partition layout because of Rust duplication.. but only on systems upgraded from ancient times before this was the norm.)
When I was trying to go upstream having used Pop!_OS for a while, I installed Kubuntu first and even though the install went through, the distro had problems getting to the desktop after post-install reboot. Even though my laptop is a Thinkpad which is supposed to be very well supported. I took this as a sign of things to come and shrugged off my hangover of rpm hell(!) and tried with Fedora+KDE instead. Best decision I made. I have been using it for a few months now and experience has been absolutely seamless and smooth sailing - highly recommended.
The versions are all pinned to the ones picked for the April release. The .1 at the end is just a grace period so people don't get update prompts in case there are bugs in the .04 release.
That's great, but they are also intending to comply with the OS-level age verification [1]. Initial implementations will somehow be privacy protecting, but eventually the temptation to tie a specific person to an OS fingerprint will become too great.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rk4fj7/ubun...
They wanted the personal computer to store and report personal information. I hope they have their best surprised faces ready for when computers report what the owner wants them to report.
Run firefox with Ublock Origin and all blocks turned on. Add Sponsorblock to block in-video sponsor crap on Youtube.
Run Bypass Paywalls Clean from https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_uploads
If you're listening to a music playlist on YouTube, this removes interruptions caused by the pointless intro and outro screens added to songs.
The Linux implementation I've seen is the Freedesktop implementation that just responds to a user profile flag. There's no cryptography involved, it's just like asking for a room number like the adduser command does.
Edit: well except American states don't flag your operating system as illegal unless they ask for your room number. Canonical and all the other Linux companies really like being able to make money and not spend all of their earnings on lawyers.
I've had issues starting with Debian because it doesn't ship with broad support for wifi hardware, and internet over USB to iphone hotspot also didn't work. The only option was to get wired ethernet to bring up wifi.
What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.
I've had to use Claude multiple times to fix my Ubuntu distro when an upgrade causes some part of it to stop working, and this Snap/APT mishmash sometimes confuses it too: "you need the Snap version. I was wrong you need the APT version. I was wrong you need to build from source..". Gets there in the end if you give it a bit of help.
One can choose any Linux distro that has good installation and operator's instructions, such as Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Red Hat, etc, etc, etc, and follow those instructions.
It might be hard for some youngsters and hypesters to believe, but novices were installing and operating Linux on their home computers long before LLM research even began.
- Inertia, I've used it for a long time.
- It's based on Debian. I like Debian and use it on servers.
- I chose it originally because it had better desktop support than Debian. It's possible that Debian is now also good, but see above...inertia.
- It (mostly) just works on a wide range of hardware, whilst remaining up-to-date with the latest Linux developments.
- I like the release cycles. Debian stable is too stable. Arch/Fedora/Debian-testing are too volatile. Ubuntu allows me to choose whether to follow the 9-month support window of a normal release; or the 5-year window of the LTS.
Everything above is highly subjective and by no means are other preferences invalid. All Linux distros are awesome in their own unique way.
It's also the reference OS for tons of free software out there.
I appreciate that they're running a business, but the Fedora/RHEL split feels much cleaner, and Fedora is my current go-to in instances where I used to reach for Ubuntu. (Or I use Debian, for headless/server setups)
A few years later (2008-ish), my college issued everybody Thinkpads. The default solution to nearly every problem was "re-image". Strangely, the images they used still had the 4-ish GB OEM recovery partition. I had enough insight to know they didn't use it. After searching for a user-friendly distro that could fit in 4GB, I settled on Xubuntu. I've since moved away from it (and Ubuntu in general), but not XFCE.
For the rest Ubuntu's only reason for being is that it's the basis of many good distros like Linux Mint.
Other machines in the house are Mint.
Having it also on the desktop makes things, less compatibility issues.
I would frame this the other way around. Why would anyone pick any other distro over Debian or Ubuntu?
While most data loss severity bugs reported in the 25.10 round of testing [1] have been resolved, the sheer volume of unexpected breakage suggests that there are more to be discovered. Most impacted are unit tests and shell scripts that expect some utility to return syscall errors in stderr and propagate it to a non-zero exit code, where on Ubuntu 26.04 they might silently swallow (apparent, partial or complete) failure to execute the requested action.
(Also, uutils binaries are ridiculously large, but this is not such big deal: Ubuntu has for many years already built rather large initramfs and has yet to make progress in automatically detecting which firmware blobs cannot possibly be needed on a given system. I did run into an "undersized" partition layout because of Rust duplication.. but only on systems upgraded from ancient times before this was the norm.)
[1]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues?q=is%3Aissue+%28l...
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-26-04-1-lts-released/8...
I had the prompt on my work machine this morning which was previously running 24.04.x and is now on 26.04.1.
ubuntu does two releases in a year, one in april (26.04) and one in october (26.10 on october 15)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history
26.04 is an LTS release, 26.10 will not be.