Hello folks, welcome back to the Ubuntu Desktop monthly updates. It was hugely exciting to be able to share Ubuntu 24.10 with the world and it’s been great to read your feedback and ideas as well as celebrate Ubuntu’s 20th anniversary together!
Now it’s time to turn our focus towards the future and prepare ourselves for the Plucky Puffin, our upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release.
A couple of weeks ago, the Canonical leadership and engineering teams spent time together in The Hague, planning our roadmap for the next six months (and beyond) as well as spending time with the community at the fantastic Ubuntu Summit.
It’s time to share with you the outcomes of those plans so you can follow our journey.
Disclaimer: as we go, please bear in mind that roadmaps can and do change over the course of the development cycle. 
Further refinements to the desktop installer
For this release, we’re returning our focus to the desktop installer to improve the user journey with a specific emphasis around the dual-boot experience.
Our goal is to provide additional messaging around the presence of other OS’s on your device and refine the scenarios around ‘Install into free space’ and ‘erase and replace an existing Ubuntu installation’.
We also want to provide out-of-the-box encryption options for dual-boot instals as well as more graceful handling of Windows BitLocker encryption scenarios. Currently we prompt users to turn off BitLocker encryption on Windows in all dual-boot scenarios, however there are circumstances where a user might have a non-encrypted drive or unencrypted partition that does not require this.
Behind the scenes, the snapd, kernel and subiquity teams have continued to work on the underlying components for broader hardware compatibility support for TPM backed FDE. We hope to bring NVIDIA driver support to this install option for Ubuntu 25.04 as well as pin and password management to the desktop’s Security Center.
For desktop administrators in organisations, we also intend to add the ability to authenticate to Landscape to provide autoinstall configurations during install.
Accessibility improvements
Accessibility is one of the core values of Ubuntu Desktop and we’re continually improving our support in this area. Last development cycle we commissioned an in-depth third-party audit of the critical path of the desktop experience which helped us identify a range of opportunities to improve keyboard navigation, screen reader capabilities and high-contrast options. Our goal is to resolve as many of these actions as we can this cycle and collaborate with upstream communities (such as Flutter or Yaru) in areas where such benefits would be more broadly applicable.
Core Desktop
It was fantastic to hear so much enthusiasm from the community about the prospect of an immutable Ubuntu Core Desktop during the Ubuntu Summit. This was spurred on by Kevin Ottens’ presentation on our partnership with him and a team of KDE developers to bring a KDE Neon experience to the table in parallel to our own Ubuntu Desktop session.
This partnership has been incredibly useful in refining the architecture and permissions model of the components that make up Ubuntu Core Desktop. As a result, this cycle we’ll be breaking out some additional system services (such as Pipewire) into their own snaps to reduce the work needed for others to create their own bespoke sessions.
Upstream Flutter contributions
Whilst this work is being driven by the Mir team rather than Desktop team within Canonical, I think it’s relevant for readers of this post to follow our upstream proposal and PRs for desktop multi-window support in Flutter currently in review by the community.
You can read the public design document here which aims to cover established desktop application paradigms like multiple top-level windows, parent-child relationships and their relative positioning, modality and other window properties without asking the application developer to make those decisions in their application code. This means developers should be able to build a complex application that will behave well across platforms from building blocks provided by the Flutter framework.
The demo video here gives you a tour of our supporting proof of concept running on Windows. Linux parity with this demo is something we’re also working on this cycle.
GNOME 48 + Linux 6.14
As always, we’re committed to delivering the latest GNOME 48 and all the new features that come with it, whilst continuing to to backport improvements to GNOME 46 in Noble.
As a result of our new kernel selection policy, we can also announce at the start of the development cycle that we intend to ship Linux 6.14 as the Ubuntu 25.04 Kernel (and therefore the second HWE kernel for Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS).
Firefox & Smartcards
In terms of our seeded applications we’re investing more effort in resolving one of the main outstanding Firefox snap issues regarding smartcard support.
This work has already begun and so far we’ve implemented some initial work focussed on Opensc-supported smart cards.
To test the current progress users need to connect the new Pcscd interface with:
snap connect firefox:pcscd
Then in Firefox go to ‘Settings > Security Devices > Load’ and input the path manually as
/usr/lib/TRIPLET/opensc-pkcs11.so
We’ll be sure to keep you updated on further progress during the course of the development cycle.
Papercuts & Polish
Whilst headline features tend to get the most words dedicated to them in this post, it’s important to cover some of the more under-the-hood work that is done to continually refine the desktop experience. Let’s do a quick-fire round of some of this work.
- Complete the migration of all seeded snaps to Core 24 including the Steam snap and its associated gaming graphics PPAs.
- Update the Steam snap AppArmor profile to support our Home directory prompting feature when enabled.
- Rolling out “Top Charts” support in the App Center for users to browse app categories based on popularity.
- Implementing and backporting fixes for reported issues around NVIDIA + Wayland setups.
- CUPS performance improvements.
- Permissions prompting user experience improvements.
- Switching our default PDF viewer from Evince to Papers.
- Adding device registration to authd.
The tip of the iceberg
I hope you enjoyed this rundown of our current priorities for Plucky Puffin!
Look forward to a number of more focussed deepdives on each of the topics discussed during the course of the cycle as well as a dedicated update on some of the exciting new work around Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux early next year.
Until next time!