Ubuntu Flavor sync meeting notes: March 10, 2025

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Representatives from the Ubuntu Flavors along with various Canonical and community leads met on March 10th 2025 to discuss the upcoming release of Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin among other desktop and flavor developments:

Introductions

@ilvipero kicked off both sessions with a few reminders of the basic rules of flavor sync meetings.

  • 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.

More information about the Ubuntu Flavor Sync meetings can be found on this announcement post.

Announcements

Keep in touch with the Release Team

  • @utkarsh encouraged all Flavors to be active and available in the relevant Matrix rooms during the final phases of Ubuntu 25.04 release, especially around Beta testing week.
  • Important Matrix rooms to keep an eye on for all Flavor representatives and other involved parties:

Meetingology

@tsimonq2 announces :drum: :drum: :drum:
:mega: Meetingology :mega: . This is a new meeting assistant bot for Matrix :speech_balloon: , written in python :snake: . This is live in the “Ubuntu Meeting Room” Matrix room. The code is open source and available on launchpad. This is an important stepping stone to make Matrix a first class tool for the Ubuntu Community. Testing, patches, and bug reports are welcome! :rocket:

Release related updates:

Ubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin mascot and wallpapers

  • Canonical Design Team completed the work for the Plucky Puffin mascot assets. The Canonical Community Team will share the .svg files on Tuesday 11 March 2025.
  • @seb128 reminded us that wallpapers from the Ubuntu Plucky Puffin 25.04 Wallpaper Competition need to be ready before UI freeze this Thursday, 13 March 2025.

Installer experience

@ilvipero shared his view that it would be beneficial to have a similar if not exact same feature parity across flavors installers. Even when using different installers, providing similar features would create a more unified and familiar experience for the Ubuntu community.

  • Some flavors need calamares installer for various reason, so they are not going to adopt the Ubuntu installer.
  • General feel is that this is a sensible request. Rik Mills and @arraybolt3 mentioned that it would make sense to discuss this further.
  • Release being very close, this is more likely to be a long term action item to be discussed async in the flavor channel and on the Ubuntu Discourse.
  • @itzswirlz commented that changes to the installer slideshow could also be considered. While flavors need their own slides, perhaps a few ones could be shared.

Get involved!

Ubuntu Flavor Sync Meetings take place every 2 months on the second Monday of January, March, May, July, September. 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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Well, there was another very recent thread that took this topic of “feature parity” aka homogeneity of the flavors and/or their characteristics, i.e. see - Maybe it's time to promote KDE Plasma and retire the different flavours' logos?

There were some pretty strong feelings expressed there as well. It really doesn’t make sense to have “flavors” and then try to reel them back in. It does seem to hint at the demise of the flavor identity and if it isn’t a significant change, then why mention it? Or even spend time and resources discussing it (it does seem clear that the discussion is significant since there’s a followup proposed here).

Also, I am assuming the desire for parity comes from outside the flavors.

i.e. Why would Lubuntu want to have parity with Kubuntu or Ubuntu? Other than with those things that have nothing to do with the flavor identity?

From a user commitment point of view, I do strongly consider the features and predicts of direction of builds from such small things as the apparent freedom of the install.

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Not at all. You’re misreading that altogether. This has to do with the installer, nothing more.

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@eeyore thank you for leaving feedback. We always value all discussions and constructive criticism is always welcome!

I hope this helps clarify what I meant and please let me know if this was not very clear in the notes, so I can edit it.

My thought was about the foundational aspect of what options are presented during installation. For example, Some flavors installer offer LVM, encrypted LVM, ZFS. Some others do partitioning in a different way and do not have the same options for partitioning the disk during install. And I was suggesting that users of Ubuntu and Ubuntu Flavors might find it more familiar if they could have similar disk options during installation.

This was a discussion point, and nothing more. The decision is in the hands of the Ubuntu Flavors, and each flavor can decide what they think is best for them.

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Yep, I focused in on a topic to be sure.