The New Ubuntu Linux "Flavor" We All Expected

Key Takeaways

recently canonical declared from on high that all official Ubuntu flavors must stop including flat pack this was never going to affect Mainline gnome Ubuntu ever since they existed this has been all in on snaps but kubuntu zubuntu Ubuntu unity and mate either included right now or very soon were planning to include flat pack this change caused a little bit of an uproar especially considering that a lot of people out there already aren't a massive fan of snaps so I am surprised but only a very very tiny amount that this project exists this is Ubuntu flat pack remix and considering this just came out a couple of days ago it's still very much an alpha and probably shouldn't be run on a production system but you can go and test it this is the Ubuntu desktop but with flat pack a very vanilla Ubuntu based distro but without that focus on snaps which from now on I'm just gonna call it ufr because the full name is a little bit too wordy but hold on a second isn't that completely pointless why does this history even exist all the change did to Ubuntu was stop the flavors shipping flat pack and the flat pack tooling and any flat packs out of the box just not shipping them with the distro they are still available in the repos and you can very easily go and install them it's literally a one-liner to get back to where you were so does this distro make any sense is it just completely pointless well if all it did was do that I would say yeah it's pretty pointless but it does do a little bit more so not only does this include flat pack tooling as should be expected it also shifts the focus of the distro away from snaps towards flat packs more like you would see on the Fedora side a great example of this is with Firefox so for quite a while now the Firefox on Ubuntu is going to be a snap they are fully committed to making Firefox as a snap a really good experience you may think it is you may think it's not but either way it's certainly been getting better this can be removed and replaced with Firefox you compile yourself Firefox from a PPA or Firefox as a flat pack but out of the box Firefox is always going to be a snap over on ufr that's not the case here it is always going to be a flat pack along with other things which would typically be available as a snap like Thunderbird like LibreOffice basically any application would have been a snap over on Ubuntu is now going to be a flat pack instead now I hadn't mentioned it thus far but the current version isn't actually based on 22.10 instead it is based on the previous LTS release 22.04 but looking at the GitHub it seems like there are plans to do 22.10 there's an issue though it's literally just started as a project so uh currently no builds or scripts exist for 22.10 this will be developed after 22.04 stabilizers once 23.04 stabilizers that should be preferred for intermediary releases support should be for current LTS and current intermediary open discussion of course so considering where we are in the release cycle with you know it being March 14 2023 23.04 is like just around the corner so even though it says all this considering this project is being run by a single person I wouldn't be surprised if 22.10 just never actually happens now besides just the flat pack change another knit little addition is being made specifically bumping the version of Mesa so over on 22.04 LTS normally you would have 22.2.5 on this version it's going to be 22.3.5 it's not a massive jump it's not a jump all the way up to like Mesa Ravel Mesa 23 but any neat little bump is always going to make the gaming experience just a tiny bit better don't expect this distro to be making changes like pop OS this is not made to be this whole separate thing that is different from Ubuntu this is supposed to be the vanilla Ubuntu experience with some minor tweaking and no snaps and that's pretty much it now when you're looking at an LTS release for day-to-day use there are sort of two ways you can look at using it one of them is you want absolutely nothing to change you want things to be completely stable this is sort of you know you're trying to develop software and you don't want dependencies to be changing and you want to know exactly the environment you're developing for but sometimes you might want to have this unchanging base but you still want to have up-to-date applications like with libreoffers for example the newer the version of LibreOffice the better support it's going to have for the documents over on the Microsoft side so it's generally advised to use the newest stable version possible and the best way to do that one is not being updated in your repos is doing it through the flat pack so should you use this project well to answer that you have to answer some very simple questions do you really like the vanilla Ubuntu experience Ubuntu with ubuntu's version of genome but you just don't like the snaps and you want to get rid of them and you don't want to go through the trouble of doing it yourself as the self-aware FAQ says why go through the trouble of creating this it only takes five minutes to install flat pack you know when someone saves you five minutes of your time it's probably better to thank them than to nitpick which is fair go ahead and use it then that is if you can find the download button uh sometimes you know wheels don't need to be reinvented you might think this is the download button no it is the giant CD over here why change how download buttons work I don't know but it is what it is one thing to note probably because the dev doesn't want to pay for hosting there is no direct download for the ISO on the website the button here is going to download a torrent it's not a major deal most people probably have a torrenting software set up on their system but just a heads up all of that is just the distro itself I've made it pretty clear in the past how I generally feel about destroys like this I don't really see much of a reason for them to exist it takes more time to replace your current Ubuntu with ufr then just fixing all of the stuff that this would fix on the Ubuntu already have installed but but if you're making a shift already and you don't mind having zero support from official Ubuntu it's probably fine to use once it gets out of Alpha and you know everything is a bit more stabilized but I do think this still doesn't really need to exist and the exact same could be achieved by just making a script instead that did all of the same things more akin to something like lobs from Luke Smith or dtos from distrotube where you just install the regular distro in this case it's with Arch Linux but this could be done with Ubuntu Fedora anything else out there and then you just have this post install script that does all of this extra configuration for you which would get it into the exact same state that ufr is currently in but that's just coming from my perspective on Arch generally you don't just go and make an arch-based distro that makes a couple of minor tweaks on the Ubuntu side on the Fedora side that is a little bit more common so it does make sense in that context now one other thing I hadn't mentioned is who actually made this project you might have spotted it on the website this was made by learn Linux TV he has got a video going over this explaining all the details in more of the uh the distro review sort of format so if you want to go see his perspective on it and everything else that I might have missed here's other great videos in his channel and is generally just an all-round good Creator don't ask me why I'm not subscribed I sometimes forget to and with that that's gonna be it for me so let me know your thoughts in the comment section down below are you going to run this are you going to keep an eye on the project do you think it should just be an install script like I said or do everything at ISO is perfectly fine I would love to know so if you liked the video go and like the video and if you really like the video and you want to become one of these amazing people over here check out the patreon scribes alibera pay linked down below that's gonna be it for me and Snaps are bad [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music]