Upgrade your desktop: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available | Hacker News Reader

Upgrade your desktop: Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS is now available

ubuntu.com

80 pointsd99kris103 comments

> 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.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1rk4fj7/ubun...

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.

Dont ask permission.

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

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.

Is there a good combo that works with spotify web?

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?

Piracy.

I have been experimenting with self hosting Navidrome for that purpose.

I recommend buying your own CDs (at your local music store, directly from the band when you attend their concerts, or on Bandcamp/Discogs), ripping them, and putting them on the local file system of your MP3 player, phone, your car’s SD card, etc. Sometimes if you buy a vinyl record it comes with a convenient download code, and if it doesn’t digital albums are very cheap on Bandcamp.

I also recommend tuning regularly onto your favorite radio station (mine is KEXP Seattle; and Rás 2 in Iceland) particularly when they have live performance to discover new music.

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.

You can never own a device with a cellular modem. They can all provide backdoor access regardless of the primary OS.

It is possible to build a device where the modem is not at all trusted, but I don't know if anyone is actually doing that.

Librem 5 has a removable modem on M.2 card. Would this count?

GrapheneOS does everything and more for key attestation, allowing security sensitive applications to test the integrity of the device. Sadly some apps like google wallet not only check for attestation, but check if Google's signed it. Which is against the idea of attestation in the first place.

So google's tap to pay doesn't work, but others do, like garmin pay. Random bank apps are hit and miss.

> GrapheneOS does everything and more for key attestation

Right, that's the problem, in my opinion. I'm not referring to the apps that require Google's keys only, I'm referring to the ones that allow GrapheneOS keys too. If you use one of these apps, you can use vanilla GrapheneOS builds, but you cannot run your own self-signed builds.

You are gaining freedom relative to running Google's OS, but you are still not free to further modify the software running on your own device.

Apps that require "integrity" should monitor their own integrity only, they should not attempt to infer the integrity of their environment.

Trick is there's no integrity without the OS. Cheats can ruin games, keyloggers can record passwords, music/movies can be stolen, bitcoins can be stolen, etc.

Attestation does not solve this.

How so? Seems like it's a pretty big step in the right direction, sure an attested phone is going to be much harder to compromise than one with custom os, custom kernel, and a user with root.

Attestation only detects user-initiated "compromises" like unlocking the bootloader and flashing a custom ROM. It does not detect exploitation.

The fewer devices doing it, the more effective it will be for those who do it.

How is that even remotely related?

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'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'm curious what the audience is for Ubuntu nowadays? If you use it - why Ubuntu over another distro?

I would frame this the other way around. Why would anyone pick any other distro over Debian or Ubuntu?

> Debian

Release cycle extremely slow, unstable and testing don't really fix the problem, and insert their own issues. Still near and dear to my heart and if I need something pretty light, stable, but can get by with older software, it's still a solid choice for headless servers.

> Ubuntu

Ubuntu was for "noobs" probably 10-15yr after my Linux journey started. I watched them inject ads into the desktop and cli. I would use it from time to time on certain things and it would often break during upgrades. This was a consistent problem for over a decade, but it has gotten better. Now they're rewriting coreutils in rust and breaking compatibility along the way. And snap? Snap is an abomination. It is a limited ecosystem and the daemon itself is a damn attack vector.

> Fedora

Massive open source community and tons of money behind it, as it is the feeder distro of RHEL, which has been used at pretty much every company I've worked at. In fact if you use RHEL, you'll often be able to see many new features just be running Fedora somewhere else. Also one of the primary adopters and users of Gnome if you're okay with that, and I'd note of course they have a release for other WM/UI if you're into whatever. Also always seems to be a software release for it (Fedora and Debian/Ubuntu seem to be the most common big 3 for support). It uses flatpaks instead of snap, which gives you sandboxing and user-level package updates allowing your base OS to stay a bit cleaner if you want, or you can just use system packages (yum/dnf). Good on desktop and server.

> Arch

If the only person you have to support is you and you want the latest and greatest, and it has amazing community docs. Better than Debian by far, which wasn't always the case. The Debian handbooks were pretty legendary for a long time. Can be very fast and very light. Solid system.

> Alpine

You need/want MUSL and aren't using distroless container images for whatever reason.

This is just my opinion from an old grump that has a history of managing decent sized fleets of both pets and cattle and runs it at home on desktops and laptops.

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 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.

Hardware support.

Where do you not get hardware support? Many, many distros work out of box nearly everywhere.

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.

The audience is people that haven't realized that Ubuntu lost its way +10 years ago.

Where did everyone else go?

Back to Debian. It caught up where it matters.

Personally because DGX OS is forked from it and DGX Software Stack is supported out of the box. This is a dual 6000 Blackwell machine.

Other machines in the house are Mint.

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.

May I suggest Debian? It's 90+% the same as Ubuntu, and is updated about as often as Ubuntu LTS, but no snaps.

This is genuinely what I'd answer to almost every comment in this thread.

For parent: Debian's release cycle is great, on top of letting you choose a degree of stability with one word: https://www.debian.org/releases/

> letting you choose a degree of stability with one word

Debian Sid: the original rolling release distro.

I tried Debian before, but settled for Ubuntu LTS for their predictable release cycle and LTS support, combined with Debian's disadvantages of slow and irregular, and needing more tinkering to support my hardware.

Checking out Debian's release cycle, it seems like things have changed a lot. I need to give it another try.

I usually don't use LTS. Debian release cycle is too long for me.

In my case I won't notice a difference. I use Ubuntu LTS for the stability and LTS, and it seems Debian release cycle is also every two years.

Ubuntu LTS comes out every two years, and the x.1 release after the first six months is the point where it's as rock solid as it will be for the rest of the support cycle. Interim releases gave me too much trouble, because there's no stable x.1 for them, only a new release with new potential surprises.

IMO Ubuntu interim releases are the equivalent of Debian Testing, testing grounds to prepare for the next real^w stable release.

Unless you only use what's in the "main" section (which is surprising small, far more things are in "universe" than you'd expect), then you are getting the same software (or sometimes even older) than Debian.

Considered any alternatives? Like atomic OS images, e.g. Fedora derivatives?

I don't like immutable distros. I play around too much. I tried normal Fedora but an update broke my graphics stack and I didn't like that. Other than that I am used to Deb and it just works.

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 like multipass.

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

For engineering, most cloud VMs run Ubuntu/Debian.

Having it also on the desktop makes things, less compatibility issues.

Clueless companies with clueless IT departments that want someone to call when things break.

For the rest Ubuntu's only reason for being is that it's the basis of many good distros like Linux Mint.

i run it in wsl, main appeal is that I mostly run things on debian servers at work so I always feel at home when developing stuff

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.

Has the most packages, with the least quality of packaging.

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.

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.

If you are on nvidia Jetson, Ubuntu is basically a necessity.

Fedora IoT seems to advertise support for it. Have not tested it yet but I am very tempted.

I'm using lubuntu, but it just works, stable, solid, widespread support. no notes, no complaints

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.

Hahaha, the "omg n00buntu is for n00bs" cretins have started brigading I see.

Comment, don't vote.

At some point you just want something that works and is somewhat familiar, so sticking with a distro makes sense even when it becomes somewhat annoying.

I remember the early days of Linux when I'd be using a dial-up modem to overnight download Linus' hot-off-the-press kernel tarballs to build myself and update my system ... nowadays I just want a working computer with minimum fuss, and cost (else a MacBook might make more sense).

From my experience it feels like the "de facto" server choice for CICD jobs that can specify. I don't know why that is, possibly just that it's widely available.

Ubuntu do a lot of work bundling proprietary drivers I think- probably the reason a bunch of popular distros are built on top of it (pop-os, elementary, mint)

Ubuntu for experimentation with Robotics/ROS2. Windows for experimentation with FPGA/Vivado. A dual-boot 14" Lenovo E14 to host the festivities.

For me it is inertia. I started using Ubuntu back in 2010. It works well enough that I haven‘t bothered to switch. I may finally switch if decide to fill to distro with AI crap.

I use it for work (and a homelab). For me, it's got more up-to-date versions of software than Debian and it's easy to search for solutions to issues as it's got a large user base.

I'm not a fan of the various redhat/centos distros as I've had issues in the past with RPM based distributions. It's possible to have problems with DEB based systems, but in my experience it's a lot easier to fix DEB systems than RPM ones.

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.

> Luckily with a CLI-based AI, one can choose...

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'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.

im out of the loop here, whats the last sentence referring to?

Slop born of plagiarism. People would rather read a pastiche of documentation than the actual documentation.

I don't think people are using Claude to read docs to them, rather modifying their system for them.

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.

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.

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

Or, you know, you can read the documentation and actually learn how to use your system. It isn't hard, dude.

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.)

[1]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/issues?q=is%3Aissue+%28l...

On a more positive note, the thing that causes me some temporary pain might still be awesome for the long-term success of GNU/Linux (or whatever we shall call it now, still looking for an updated pasta[1] recipe). As much as it was a little too early a little too move fast break stuff, I applaud Ubuntu for demanding the drop-in-replacement to be possible.

To get where they are now, uutils needed to do the thing nobody bothered to do for 30 years: proper cli unit tests, the kind with which you can compare busybox/toybox/GNU/uutils/Darwin without depending on implementation details [2]. This will net more future good than current harm. Even if the tools cannot be changed to have fewer nonsensical edge cases for compatibility reasons, at least now I can ask $currentLLM to write me a better manpage, one that includes the gotchas [3] and factual errors that the 1996 (partly updated in 2004) version still fails. And improve shellcheck so even those among future generations that still need the shell as we know it today are not bitten by its warts as much.

[1]: https://safereddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/av4rl9/what_your... [2]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking [3]: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-gotchas.html

The [2] link is uutils using the test suite that the GNU coreutils maintainers, including myself, created and continue to improve. This test suite has long predated uutils and gets equal, if not more, man-hours than the program implementations themselves.

When you say that no one bothered to do this testing until uutils existed, it feels like you are discrediting our work. Any other implementation is free to use our test suite, as long as they respect its licensing. Doing so is relatively straightforward; you just need to point a shell variable to the place with the just-built binaries.

Note that the man pages are a quick reference explaining the options. A lot of gotchas and further explanations are located in the texinfo manual, which is over 300 pages in PDF form [1]. If you notice areas where it could be improved, I would be happy to review your bug report sent to bug-coreutils@gnu.org.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/coreutils.html

Worse: I am writing angry and not particularly respectful comments about things that mostly happened/did not happen before I was born and very obviously those things should not be judged by what I would consider an ideal outcome by the standards of today, at least not before sending in a few patches to help with that. Sorry.

Your work, specifically your attention to the reusability/portability of GNU tests intensifying at the same time the uutils project started to close in on the remaining unusable (for that purpose) tests, is very much appreciated and has helped me well beyond its original scope.

This update came out over a month ago...

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-26-04-1-lts-released/8...

yes but this announcement is presumably about it being ungated for `do-release-upgrade` commands from existing 24.04 LTS installations.

You couldn't have upgraded from 24.04 to 26.04?

Nope, if you tried the do-release-upgrade before this morning it just told you there's nothing new available.

You could if you added a flag, same with upgrading from 24.04 to 24.10 or 25.04, but not without a flag.

This is for the .1 release which allows you to upgrade from the previous LTS.

I had the prompt on my work machine this morning which was previously running 24.04.x and is now on 26.04.1.

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.

I installed Kubuntu on a laptop for work, since I use KDE at home. It was slightly annoying to have to re-configure stuff like the DE settings, Dolphin etc though.

Anyone have suggestions for syncing/version controlling KDE Plasma 6 configurations?

(I made an Ask HN for it as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49910250)

This must be the first time I see the Falkland Islands represented in one of these generic globe renders, go on you Ubuntu...

The actual changelog can be found at https://documentation.ubuntu.com/release-notes/26.04/1/

What's with the ".04" in the version numbers?

yy.mm

It came out in April. Their LTS releases always come out in April of even numbered years.

But the "final" LTS release is always in August, so maybe they should also have a .08

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.

It's a patch release, therefore the .1 suffix.

[year].[month].[patch]

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

It's the release month, so 26.04 is April 2026. 26.10 lands in October.

> It's the release month, so 26.04 is April 2026. 26.10 lands in October.

26.04 is an LTS release, 26.10 will not be.

.1 point release is when autoupgrade becomes available to 24.04 users and is usually roughly 3 months after April (.04) release).

What happened to Ubuntu Core Desktop the snap-only atomic version?

Hot garbage since they abandoned Upstart in 15.04.

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