Representatives from the Ubuntu Flavors along with various Canonical and community leads met on May 28th 2025 to discuss the upcoming release of Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka among other desktop and flavor developments:
Introductions
@ilvipero 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. -
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 .
Introductions
- Quick introductions by @jnsgruk @uralt and @andersson123
Agenda items
Ubuntu Installer
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- Asked all flavors to move to the new, flutter based Ubuntu Installer by 26.04.
- Currently 3 flavors are affected by this: Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Unity.
- Feature gap can be covered by Canonical engineering teams before the end of the 26.04 release cycle.
- Understanding from flavor leads who are already using the Ubuntu installer, the transition is fairly painless.
- More automation is being looked after, and Canonical teams are willing to run more automated testing for flavors who are on the Ubuntu Installer.
- There will soon be a new way to build iso images. This should reduce the amount of manual work that flavors will have to do.
- It could be hard to get this done by 26.04, therefore parties who are heavily affected, can still ship an additional ISO with Calamares for 26.04.
- Potentially there could be a specific branch of the snap that takes care of Kfocus needs.
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- Neal just went through something similar in the Fedora and openSUSE worlds. He is concerned that after acceptance, functionality could be dropped, and some people might feel weary of this situation.
- Ubuntu Cinnamon to be considered a stakeholder due to timeshift’s btrfs features.
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- Rick provides context on the relationship between Kfocus and Kubuntu
- Rick would like to have collaboration between all involved parties to bring feature parity to the Installer
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- Erich suggests that for 25.10 affected flavors have dual ISOs.
- Challenges with the RPI images and the first run experience being tied to the old tech.
- @jnsgruk comments that regarding RPI experience, we should work together to solve the RPI images story for all flavors instead of focusing on a particular flavor image at a time.
- It is a critical feature for Edubuntu, Kubuntu, etc. that there be a “white-label” post-install initial setup tool for OEMs to create the initial user. This was originally planned for 24.04 LTS but has been pushed back and still doesn’t exist.
- @Conan_Kudo mentioned that Fedora has had to use an initial setup system leveraging Anaconda for the Fedora flavor spins and editions since gnome-initial-setup is bad for flavor branding.
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- Michael explains the desire to contribute to a single unified installer but provides additional information about the amount of work that was needed to complete the customization regarding btrfs and rollback features on Kubuntu Focus.
- Michael explains the amount of dependencies and potential for breaking the current experience and confirmed he will be happy to share documentation and details with the working group.
- KFocus needs to be able to redistribute an ISO with their additional packages. See https://kfocus.org/wf/reinstall .
- @eeickmeyer commented that KFocus’ existing ISO was built with Cubic
- KFocus is also concerned about the amount of time and resources it will take to update documentation to a new installer. See the Revisions log near the bottom of this page for an idea of how much work has been done over the years.
- KFocus also has a feature to automatically handle a second disk if it meets certain characteristics
- Flavor developers don’t have expertise with Flutter but do now have expertise with Calamares
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- Lubuntu is not planning to switch installer unless required to by the TB. If the new installer was to fit better with Lubuntu’s identity (i.e. by having a native Qt-based user interface), they might be more interested in switching.
- Aaron overall opposes the fact that Canonical wants to push all the flavors to use a single installer.
- Flavors should have the freedom to decide which features their installer supports, and quotes the example of ZFS on root.
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Action items
- Community team to facilitate Matrix Channels and recurring meetings with the specific purpose of working on the installer.
- Community team to reach out to @rs2009 and the Lubuntu team regarding installer and make sure everyone’s feedback is welcome and contributions even more so.
- @eeickmeyer would like to be involved with this working group.
- We should make sure Kfocus is invited to the regular flavor sync meetings and specific installer related meetings.
Ubuntu Flavors spec
@ilvipero sent an update regarding the Ubuntu Flavors spec. This document aims to clearly define what it means to be an official Ubuntu Flavor, including perks, requirements, expectations, and processes. He will be working on this item during the current 25.10 release cycle, and would like collaboration from Ubuntu Flavors and governance bodies.
Get involved!
Ubuntu Flavor Sync Meetings take place every 2 months on the second Monday of January, March, May, July, September, November. 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!