Hi all I’m Tim the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu Desktop. I think the headline here may have embellished my original post, so if you’re interested, you can find it here [1].
Ubuntu is (almost) 20 years young! As I am sure you can appreciate that means a long history of technical changes. We’re looking to modernise the desktop. We started with 23.04 when we moved from Ubiquity to Subiquity, the Ubuntu Server installer, unifying our tech stack to create a more coherent installation experience across Ubuntu Server and Desktop. We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent).
Still, we need to be bolder. In fact we shouldn’t be talking about the installer nearly so much; it's a tool not the destination. I want to improve the installation through the first boot experience so we can move onto more interesting things. We’re exploring a range of changes to get this part right: from declarative configs to answering the question “what does security by default” mean in 2023? In the context of this headline, and to make our intentions clear, we are looking to minimise the default installation. So the plan is to have one lean installation option.
It's late in the UK so I’m going to sign off and be back at this in the morning. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what an awesome out-of-box-experience could look like (either here or in the original discourse post).
Ubuntu is (almost) 20 years young! As I am sure you can appreciate that means a long history of technical changes. We’re looking to modernise the desktop. We started with 23.04 when we moved from Ubiquity to Subiquity, the Ubuntu Server installer, unifying our tech stack to create a more coherent installation experience across Ubuntu Server and Desktop. We also moved the installer UI from GTK to Flutter to make iterating the interface much easier (Flutter tooling is excellent).
Still, we need to be bolder. In fact we shouldn’t be talking about the installer nearly so much; it's a tool not the destination. I want to improve the installation through the first boot experience so we can move onto more interesting things. We’re exploring a range of changes to get this part right: from declarative configs to answering the question “what does security by default” mean in 2023? In the context of this headline, and to make our intentions clear, we are looking to minimise the default installation. So the plan is to have one lean installation option.
It's late in the UK so I’m going to sign off and be back at this in the morning. We’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on what an awesome out-of-box-experience could look like (either here or in the original discourse post).
Best, Tim
[1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rethinking-ubuntu-desktop-a-m...