Ubuntu has taken another step that, honestly, leaves me scratching my head. While most distributions try to offer as many convenient GUI tools as possible to help users manage every part of their system, Ubuntu… apparently sees things a bit differently.

I say this because Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (scheduled for release on April, 23) will no longer ship the long-standing “Software & Updates” graphical tool by default on fresh desktop installs, following a change proposed in Launchpad as bug 2140527.

The adjustment replaces the software-properties-gtk package in the desktop seed with software-properties-common, effectively removing the visible GUI while keeping the underlying repository management tools in place.

  • lengau@midwest.social
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    1 hour ago

    Canonical employees have been part of making Wayland since before Mir existed. Mir came about because Canonical wanted to have something that actually worked within a reasonable amount of time. The result? A bunch of places where groups with lots of resources will contribute to Linux (such as automotive systems) use Mir because it was actually practical to use within a reasonable timeframe. A lot of the recent progress in Wayland has come because the people who were holding it up for years finally gave up and listened to the practical concerns from experts who work at places like Canonical and Nvidia.

    And snaps still do things that Flatpaks don’t, such as being able to package a kernel and system services. So even if Canonical wanted to switch to flatpak, they couldn’t. Not without making changes that are fundamentally contrary to the design of flatpak.

    I didn’t mention the Unity thing because while I don’t agree with your assertions, I do think it’s an example of how someone at Canonical’s hate for KDE has prevented them from making the same good decision at least 3 times.

    If you want to pretend it’s Canonical vs. nonprofits, you’re going to have an ugly surprise when you find out which corporation hired most of the people who held up Wayland for so long and has its tentacles so deeply in Flatpaks. (HINT: it’s not SuSE)