Ubuntu Desktop on Raspberry Pi Feedback

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We’re delighted to bring Ubuntu Desktop 20.10 to the Raspberry Pi 4, completing the Ubuntu family line-up for Raspberry Pi. We encourage you to try it out and give your feedback so we can continue to improve :chart_with_upwards_trend: Ubuntu, desktop, server and core, on the Raspberry Pi.

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In the video below, we introduce Ubuntu Desktop for the Raspberry Pi, how to set it up and get cracking.

https://youtu.be/0pT4-RcTERU

If you prefer, here are tutorials to get you started too:

:woman_student:How to install Ubuntu Desktop on Raspberry Pi 4

:man_student:How to install Ubuntu Server on your Raspberry Pi

What applications do you want to see on Raspberry Pi?

While the vast majority of the Ubuntu archive is available for ARM devices, not all developers and ISVs publish ARM builds of their software in the Snap Store or their respective websites. Comment below to let us know what software you’re missing on Raspberry Pi/ARM that you’d most like to see :eyes: made available and we’ll see what we can do.

What HATs are you using?

Raspberry Pi enjoys a rich ecosystem of HATs (Hardware attached on top) and we’re looking to expand the library of available HAT :tophat: modules/drivers in Ubuntu over the coming months. Let us know which HATs you’re using in your projects so we can better understand where to prioritise our work.

Other hardware?

Cameras, displays, GPIO, touch screens, USB accessories, and more. How has your experience been using your existing accessories and peripherals for the Raspberry Pi on Ubuntu?

What are you making with Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi?

Finally, show us that you’re using the Ubuntu Desktop on your Raspberry Pi, or what you’re using it for, for a chance to win some free Groovy Gorilla :gorilla::dark_sunglasses: goodies. Be one of the first to fill out this form: https://forms.gle/h9wodaFLFYPGps8y6

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Thank you so much for bringing the full Ubuntu desktop to the Raspberry Pi.

I’ve been playing with it for a week now on a 4 gb Raspberry Pi, and I must say that I’ve been absolutely amazed by the speed and durability of the device (given what it is, of course). Having something that is a complete desktop experience on such a small and available package is pretty amazing.

I’m a tech director for a K-12 school district, and what excites me the most is seeing the possibilities that it will bring to the future. Given that you’ve made it easier to integrate AD, and with an uncertain budget in the future, I am encouraged by what the future will bring. Again, the 4 is a little slow with Ubuntu desktop, but it is fully functional. However, each revision of the Raspberry Pi becomes a little faster. I can see the day when we can retrofit an entire school lab with Raspberry Pi 5s (or whatever) running a complete and fully-featured desktop (Ubuntu).

That, to me, is pretty exciting.

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Thanks for the kind words and I’m glad to hear this new desktop image for the Pi 4 has been working for you :slightly_smiling_face: As you say, I’m sure future Raspberry Pi devices will offer improved performance but I think there’s plenty more performance to be had from the Pi 4 via software; something we’re keen to work on :+1:

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Would this image work better on a SATA-to-USB adapter Raspberry Pi setup. At least with Ubuntu Server images, you have to do some special configuration in order to work properly on a HDD/SSD.

And of course, it would be amazing to have the different Ubuntu spins available.

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Is there a way to get a recovery shell where we can fsck and re-run resize2fs if the resize during install failed? I’m not able to remount / read only from the desktop environment.

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I filled out the form,

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but without reading what I wrote in the form see if you can spot the Pi in this pic lol.

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I would like to see the “SD card copier” ( more info here https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/another-update-raspbian/ ) included if possible. Sometimes I make a full copy of my microSD card either to another microSD as backup, or to another drive (regular spinning drive or SSD). Being able to easy make a “full snapshot” copy, and/or move to a smaller/larger drive is useful.

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I often use my Pi without keyboard/mouse, or completely headless. Without keyboard/mouse, I use barrier. I was able to install barrier. However on my Raspbian setup, I use the built-in VNC ( RealVNC ) so it would be nice if Real VNC was supported.

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Hi!

Thank you so much for this amazing release, I installed it today and I’m super excited to use it further!

One quick question though (for anyone who feels like answering): I noticed that the system is kind of choppy (the animations are not as smooth as I was expecting) compared to other non-ARM instances of Ubuntu I’ve seen. It’s probably a weird comparison but I’m since using a raspberry pi 4 with 8gb of ram I thought it could handle Ubuntu… So, do you think these stutters are expected or could it be something with my setup (eg, the card I’m using to run the system) causing it?

Thanks in advance and thanks once more for the release :slight_smile:

Oh yeah, and when it comes to software, I would love to be able to run RStudio in my pi :slight_smile:

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Also was testing the Ubuntu Pi 20.10 for a while, had hardly any problems so far, the speed is of course somehow slow - Chromium snap takes I guess about 30 seconds to start, but browsing is quite okay with Firefox and Chromium. Youtube is okay when not watching full screen. But for me a quite good start for the first release!

Since the latest Kernel 5.9 (5.10 should be even more important) and Mesa 20.3 (Vulkan support) are quite important releases for the Pi4, I was trying to get Mesa 20.3 and the kernel 5.9 run - wasn’t very successful till now.

The linux-image-5.9-rpi-lobo-arm64 kernel is installed but wasn’t able to boot into - even with modifying grub. Latest Mesa driver from ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers are also installed, but also not running it seems. Surpasses my knowledge I guess^^

Had someone tested that cases? Is there a speed improvement noticeable?

Thanks a lot for that work, also was thinking about the Pi5 running Ubuntu with a breeze for a new era of small and efficient desktop computers :slight_smile:

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Will there be a way for the flavors to build from this to make their own releases?

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I’ve installed Desktop 20.10 on my 8Gb Pi4 and have it booting from USB. Everything I’ve tried so far works nicely other than neither Firefox nor Chromium will play Youtube videos, the live comment streams appear, the opening frame displays and then after a delay, an onscreen message suggesting ‘restarting your device’ appears, there’s no audio either. Restarting makes no difference.

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In general, this works quite well. I tried it on two of my Raspberry Pi 4 boxes and am pleased. I appreciate some of the fine touches, such as vcgencmd and raspistill included. The installation went very well, and most of my favorite applications worked as expected.

My only disappointment was when I installed my favorite email tool, evolution. It installed and ran basically OK with no obvious malfunctions. What I noticed fairly quickly was that the system got a bit sluggish. I poked around and saw that there was more background processing being done than was normal. At idle with no application running, the CPU usage should be below 10% most of the time. After installing evolution, setting it up, and even uninstalling it, the heavy background CPU usage continued. I’m guessing that installing evolution may have changed some libraries that made ubuntu unhappy. I had to reflash my SD card with a fresh image and start using thunderbird email.

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Hi, have just installed on 4GB Raspberry pi 4. I used raspberry pi imager on win 10 PC and went straight to a 2TB portable HD went fine. Boots and installed on the Pi 4 OK works very fast. Checked disc size shows as 2TB so imager did a good job and install re-sized ok.
I did have a few issues getting the correct boot rom a few weeks back so would suggest you get that going OK so you can boot from HD or SSD first using Raspbian.

Thanks for your efforts.

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The installer didn’t offer to install third party software. Is this a change since 18.04?

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Thank you for your great work!!!

re applications: chromium - running chromium via snap takes REALLY long (8GB PI4B) at 1st load and gives missing canberra-gtk-module, as well as having a page unresponsive on the default page error. I have a solution which requires chromium (kiosk-mode), so I will need to work this out.
Also firefox produces some media_fatal_errs on standard 720p youtube media playback (will try to sort this out as well).
And as mentioned by youtuber DistroTube, I’d also suggest to maybe make htop part of the standard distro.

re HATs: I’d like to see Argon One’s (the same Martin used in your video) and geekworm’s X730 (https://raspberrypiwiki.com/X730) power on/restart functions supported. Have not yet tried to play with the Argon One’s scripts, but I could not get the geekworm/x730 scripts to work (/sys/class/gpio seems tow work differently than in Raspberry Pi OS).

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Hi! So I’ve been running Ubuntu 20.10 for a day or two. It looks gorgeous. I’m using an RPi4 4GB, overclocked to 2Ghz, base clockspeed at 1Ghz using Konkor cpufreq. I’ve got a 27" iIyama monitor with speakers in them and I’m running the OS off of a USB3 Samsung EVO860 SSD.

So far, I am less impressed by the speed:

  • Dragging windows feels like it goes at 15fps or so. There is some stutter when I drag windows from left to right. Also resizing windows feels like the machine is overloaded.
  • Playing Youtube videos is painfully slow in Firefox, and cpufreq complains the system is overloaded. This is even when I have the video not maximized to full screen. I’ve installed Chromium from the app store. This goes a little better, but the sound seems to stutter there.
  • Starting apps feels a tad slow

In many cases I see the CPU is topping at 2Ghz. Before I overclocked and used konkor the speed was of course even worse, but overclocking did not help the general slowness.

As a comparison I’m running TwisterOS on the same hardware, and everything feels much quicker. The looks of Ubuntu however are stunning, and if the speed was better, I could use this as the main OS.

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I have upgraded from 20.04 to 20.10, on a RPi4/4GB. There are two minor issues, which I have also reported on the Ubuntu MATE community website:

  1. Chromium takes a long time (about 90 seconds), when first opening after startup. There are many

apparmor=“DENIED”

messages in /var/log/syslog. After subsequent closing and reopening, chromium opens within 2-3 seconds.

  1. Immediately after startup a “System program problem detected” window opens. It has no “details” button, so there is no hint of what is the problem. I have checked the /var/log/syslog file, but there doesn’t appear to be anything obvious.
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This is being tracked and investigated in bug #1900783.