Representatives from the Ubuntu Flavors along with various Canonical and community leads met on January 8th 2024 to discuss the upcoming release of Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat among other desktop and flavor developments:
Introductions
Mauro Gaspari (@ilvipero) and Aaron Prisk (@aaronprisk) kicked off both sessions with a few reminders of the basic rules of flavor sync meetings.
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What?
A flavor sync meeting is a recurring meeting between parties involved in the development and release of Ubuntu and Ubuntu flavors. It happens every 2 months, therefore we have 3 flavour sync meetings for each ubuntu release. We usually have 2 sessions for each meeting, to accommodate time zones. Once a year, the flavour sync happens in person, at the Ubuntu Summit. -
Who?
Ubuntu Flavours, Ubuntu developers, upcoming flavours, downstreams, and anyone interested is welcome to join the flavour sync meetings. Quick note, the meetings are focused on the challenges and issues of the upcoming release of Ubuntu. In order to give everyone time to speak, we need to be aware of time constraints. If a topic appears to be very complex and time consuming, we can move it to Discourse discussion or schedule a separate meeting. -
How?
Ubuntu Flavor sync meetings are not streamed nor recorded. This is done on purpose to encourage honest, sometimes difficult questions and conversations. Highlights of the Flavour sync meetings are posted on the Ubuntu Discourse, to encourage ongoing conversation around the topics discussed and relevant to the development of Ubuntu releases.
Mir and Miriway
Quick introduction on Miriway and how flavours could use it by Alan Griffiths (@alan_g) . Mauro Gaspari (@ilvipero) did his best to represent Mir and Miriway during Session 2.
All information presented is available on this Discourse post by Alan Griffiths (@alan_g). Alan also gave a talk about Mir and Miriway at the Ubuntu Summit 2023.
- Simon Quigley (@tsimonq2) of Lubuntu asked questions on supporting QT based DEs, especially for Lubuntu/LXQT. Lubuntu looking to switch to wayland but KWIn is a bit heavy for the LXQT.
- Neal Gompa (@Conan_Kudo) mentioned that portal backend implementation should be prepared to be plugged to the compositor, for smaller flavours/DEs to benefit from it. Only a basic implementation would be needed.
Ubuntu Flavor Installer
The discussion quickly moved to the hot topic of Ubuntu Flavor installer.
- Tim Holmes-Mitra (@tim-hm) offered to share more information and provide resources in early February.
- Erich Eichmeyer (@eeickmeyer) commented that feature freeze is at the end of February and things need to move much quickly than that. Oliver Smith (@local-optimum), Tim Holmes-Mitra (@tim-hm), and Mauro Gaspari (@ilvipero) confirmed that all documents used in the previous cycle are available for sharing, and that Flavours should be able to follow them and share their issues on the Ubuntu Discourse for faster action.
- David Mohammed (@fossfreedom) offered his insight on the process and shared his notes with all the flavors.
Apparmor issue
Simon Quigley (@tsimonq2) reported an issue with apparmor that kills plasma widgets, appimages. Bug #2046844 “AppArmor user namespace creation restrictions caus...” : Bugs : apparmor package : Ubuntu
- John Johansen (@jjohansen) is aware of the issue with plasma widgets and is working on some long term fix. For now he has some initial fix and he can upload to a PPA today for testing: unprivileged user namespaces : “AppArmor Developers” team
- Regarding appimages, John Johansen (@jjohansen) is unable to commit to a change that asks permissions for appimages in this cycle. More work is being done to see if there are other ways to allow appimages when the +x flag is added to the package.
RPI images
- Erich Eichmeyer (@eeickmeyer) mentioned that Ubuntu snap that builds the image has been failing for Noble since November. Major change that breaks it . There is a merge proposal waiting that should be ready in a couple of days.
- Simon Quigley (@tsimonq2) asked Brian Murray (@bdmurray) if the release team has any thoughts. Brian Murray (@bdmurray) mentioned that for LTS releases, flavours should have participated to 2 prior releases on the same architecture. Brian Murray (@bdmurray) will reach out to the release team and confirm.
- David Mohammed (@fossfreedom) cautions all flavours that want LTS for RPI images. There are tricky issues that might come up for the RPI architectures. Most downloads for RPI images are for the latest releases (80%).
- Neal Gompa (@Conan_Kudo) agrees with David Mohammed (@fossfreedom) userspace on older platforms break and it is very difficult to promise LTS support to those images.
Conclusion
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!