Flavor Sync Meeting Notes - September 11, 2023

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Representatives from the Ubuntu Flavors along with various Canonical and community leads met on September 11th 2023 to discuss the upcoming release of Ubuntu 23.10 Manic Minotaur among other desktop and flavor developments:

  • Mauro Gaspari (@ilvipero) thanked Sebastien Bacher (@seb128) and other Canonical colleagues for improving the process around mascot artwork sharing.

    • Flavors that joined the meeting confirmed the process was improved and they all got the .svg files in time for UI freeze.
    • David Mohammed (@fossfreedom) asked for more specific communication if the .svg files are to be embargoed until a specific date.

  • Mauro Gaspari (@ilvipero) asked flavors to share their thoughts on things that can be improved during the release process.

    • David Mohammed (@fossfreedom) asked more communication around big changes such as the printing snap.
    • Erich Eickmeyer (@eeickmeyer) is concerned about lack of communication to the flavors during this cycle. Low activity on Ubuntu desktop IRC channel.
    • Tim Holmes-Mitra (@tim-hm) mentioned that the Desktop team posts development updates every 2 weeks on the Ubuntu discourse. Oliver Smith (@local-optimum) confirmed that the Ubuntu discourse is the place to get updates on everything Ubuntu. Tim and Oliver also mentioned that they are happy to further improve communications between the desktop team and flavors.

  • David Mohammed (@fossfreedom) confirmed he completed the work to get the new desktop installer to work with Ubuntu Budgie. David also worked on documentation to help other flavors, and submitted it for review.

    • Ken VanDine (@kenvandine) is going to share David Mohammed’s (@fossfreedom) documentation in the readme.md file of the flavor installer github repository.
    • Oliver Smith (@local-optimum) would like to move away from the old ubiquity installer as soon as possible and is grateful for the work done by both community and Canonical on this. Oliver hopes that all flavors can start using the new installer as soon as possible.
    • Tim Holmes-Mitra (@tim-hm) raised an issue with resourcing which is currently being addressed to avoid delaying important work. A followup discussion on the new installer will be scheduled.
    • Oliver Smith (@local-optimum) briefly mentioned that new flutter-based desktop frontend of the subiquity installer will undergo a series of bug fixes, will enable ZFS support, and enable TPM backed full disk encryption on supported hardware.

  • Oliver Smith (@local-optimum) asked flavors if they would be interested in Official Pi images. flavours. Lukasz Zemczak (@sil2100) sent an email to flavor leads with initial instructions on how to use the current tool. Lukasz also mentioned that major work is happening to refactor the tool. Lukasz also linked the repository for the ubuntu RPI building process. He also briefly went through the process.
    Flavors interested in the RPI images:

    • Ubuntu Budgie
    • Edubuntu
    • Xubuntu
    • Ubuntu Cinnamon

  • Ken Gilmer asked if this there are any plans for other ARM 64bit devices. Oliver Smith (@local-optimum) answered that for now we are focusing on RPI images, but this could change in the future. Lukasz Zemczak (@sil2100) confirmed that we build all current 64bit RPI devices from 4GB up.

  • Ken Gilmer informed us that Regolith Linux 3.0 was released and and that he is interested in learning more about becoming a flavor.

Ubuntu Flavor Sync Meetings take place every 2 months on the second Monday of that month. There are two sessions, 3PM UTC and 10PM UTC, to best accommodate our global community. All are welcome to join and participate in the discussion!

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It’s unfortunate that despite this, inquiries posed on Discourse go unanswered:

I think the issue @eeickmeyer brings up is communication often seems one directional and often incomplete.

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This is correct, and the point I was trying to bring-up yesterday without taking too much time. I did mention that my post in ubuntu-devel@lists went largely unanswered, and that wasn’t addressed either.

However, @wxl does bring up another point that I meant to bring up during the meeting, but it does bring up the point that @local-optimum reiterated from my call-out that Ubiquity needs to be sunsetted as soon as possible. It turns out Ubiquity relies on the old PolicyKit Local Authority (pkla) files and, therefore, depends on the polkitd-pkla package. The desktop team found a solition to this without using polkitd-pkla by including a revised polkitd permissions file, but this was not relayed to the flavors and now many of us must include polkitd-pkla in at least our live sessions.

This problem was found in Kubuntu with Ubiquity, Ubuntu Studio with Ubiquity, Edubuntu with Ubiquity, and Lubuntu with Calamares. I’m not sure how many other flavors were affected, but the short-term solution was to add polkitd-pkla to our live sessions. It’s not an ideal solution as including a revised polkitd permissions file would have been ideal, but that was not communicated. By the time we found out, it was too late in the release cycle.

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@wxl regarding your post on previous flavor sync meeting, I saw it and brought it to the attention of the desktop team.

Regarding communication in general, your point is well heard and this was the center of yesterday’s flavor sync meeting. I am going to discuss this with the desktop team and follow up with flavor leads.

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Oh, an Official Pi image for #UbuntuStudio is so high up my list of “desirables”! It would be great to have that one day.

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HI @kamennedev!

So, I was actually joking around during the meeting that @waveform had actually done a blog post about installing Ubuntu Studio on a PI. His results were… mixed. I can’t imagine doing multitrack DAW recording or real-time mixing, video editing, or 3D animation in Blender using a PI. Don’t get me wrong, the desktop environment and most of the apps will handle it just fine, but it’s the power-hungry included software that might bring it to its knees.

That said, on the Edubuntu side, I’m super excited about it. I have people asking about images for the PI and it would be amazing to get some images started. One person in particular runs a Raspberry PI computer lab in Mexico for students and wants Edubuntu on those machines, so to be able to distribute PI images for people like that would be amazing. :slight_smile:

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Yes, @eeickmeyer, you’re right - I read @waveform’s post and his conclusions were not ideal. Of course, Ubuntu Studio can be many tools to many people, and while I myself wouldn’t dare a multitrack recording session, or very complex DSP, it can certainly be useful in less-demanding situations (e.g., as a set of plugins/instruments in Carla for a live set, or to power a sound/multimedia installation, etc.).

But this might drag this discussion off-topic. I agree with you that Edubuntu deployment on RPis has immediate effects that are currently much more desirable! :slight_smile:

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Sorry for missing the meeting, and Ubuntu Kylin is also interested in the RPI images.

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