Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 879

Ubuntu Weekly News
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 879 for the week of February 9 - 15, 2025.

In this Issue

  • Engineering Ubuntu For The Next 20 Years
  • Noble 24.04.2 release delayed by a week
  • One Week until Plucky’s Feature Freeze
  • Ubuntu Technical Board Election Voting
  • Ubuntu Stats
  • Hot in Support
  • LXD: Weekly news #382
  • Rocks Public Journal; 2025-02-14
  • Other Meeting Reports
  • Upcoming Meetings and Events
  • Ubuntu Nepal’s Meet with the Contributors Series : First Session by Felipe Borges
  • Event Report - SOOCon 2025
  • LoCo Events
  • Ubuntu Flutter Community Desktop Jam (Idea)
  • Anbox Cloud 1.25.0 has been released
  • Default favorite applications for new menu
  • Canonical News
  • In the Blogosphere
  • Other Articles of Interest
  • Featured Audio and Video
  • Updates and Security for Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, 24.04, and 24.10
  • And much more!

General Community News

Engineering Ubuntu For The Next 20 Years

Jon Seager, now VP Engineering at Canonical, writes about overseeing the Ubuntu Foundations, Server and Desktop teams. Jon reflects on the last twenty years of Ubuntu, recent consolidations, and the needs for community support as we advance Ubuntu over the next twenty years.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/engineering-ubuntu-for-the-next-20-years/55000

Noble 24.04.2 release delayed by a week

Utkarsh Gupta, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release team, reports that “due to an unfortunate incident” some 24.04.2 images did not include the HWE kernel, so the release has been pushed back to 20 February 2025.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-release/2025-February/006310.html

Utkarsh Gupta has since reported livecd-rootfs has been fixed so correct HWE kernel packages will be pulled in, rebuilds have started, and we’re invited to come and help testing. New images will have serial 20250215.

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-release/2025-February/006314.html

One Week until Plucky’s Feature Freeze

Simon Quigley posts a reminder that we’re a week away from Plucky’s feature freeze. We’re invited to join the Ubuntu Flavors channel on matrix, and then walked through some key events in the near future, and things that will need to be completed in the coming weeks. Key dates and links are provided.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/one-week-until-pluckys-feature-freeze/55169

Ubuntu Technical Board Election Voting

This older thread has Merlijn Sebrechts, on behalf of the Ubuntu Community Council, reminding us what the Ubuntu Technical Board is, why its important, and includes a call for new applicants. Merlijn has now provided a list of accepted applicants, links for more about those people, and a reminder on how to vote, as the delayed election process is back in ‘motion’.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/call-for-nominations-2024-ubuntu-technical-board/50081/10

Ubuntu Stats

Bug Stats

  • Open: 144141 (+97)
  • Critical: 312 (+4)
  • Unconfirmed: 73832 (+50)

As always, the Bug Squad needs more help. If you want to get started, please see: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad

Translations

  • German: 86.93% (45867/283)
  • Ukrainian: 86.37% (47852/1389)
  • French: 85.03% (52549/6311)
  • Swedish: 80.58% (68166/786)
  • Spanish: 77.43% (79230/4578)

Hot in Support

Ubuntu Community Discourse Trending Top 5 Threads

Find more support at: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/c/support-and-help/306

Ask Ubuntu Top 5 Questions

Ask (and answer!) questions at: https://askubuntu.com/

Meeting Reports

LXD: Weekly news #382

This past week LXD received several bug fixes, as well as new features. The highlight is added support for Pure Storage storage driver.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/weekly-news-382/54954

Rocks Public Journal; 2025-02-14

Rockcraft v1.8.0 is now in the stable channel, and the team added new docs to show you how to build rocks, remotely, via Launchpad. We also merged new Chisel slice definitions, for zip, unzip, less and netcat-openbsd.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/rocks-public-journal-2025-02-14/55240

Other Meeting Reports

Upcoming Meetings and Events

Times shown are UTC unless otherwise specified. For more details and farther dates please visit: https://fridge.ubuntu.com/calendars/ | https://discourse.ubuntu.com/upcoming-events

LoCo News

Ubuntu Nepal’s Meet with the Contributors Series : First Session by Felipe Borges

Aaditya Singh tells us about a “Meet with the Contributors” session with Felipe Borges (GNOME developer). We’re reminded the ‘meets’ are to ‘bridge the gap’ between local and global source communities. This session is described as an “incredible start” to the series, with a request for other contributors interested to comment on this post.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-nepal-s-meet-with-the-contributors-series-first-session-by-felipe-borges/54946

Event Report - SOOCon 2025

Mauro Gaspari gives an event report on (State of Open Con) SOOCon 2025. We’re reminded of the event and some history. This year’s event opening speaker and sponsors reception was held at the Canonical London office. We’re walked through some details of the event: given a link to a youtube playlist of talks, shown photos, and more. SOOCon 25 “is a wrap”, but we’re told Ubuntu will be back next year, with links to OpenUK’s website & more provided.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/event-report-soocon-2025/55004

LoCo Events

The following LoCo team events are currently scheduled in the next two weeks:

Looking beyond the next two weeks? Visit the respective LoCo Team calendar to browse upcoming events.

Please see:

The Hub

Ubuntu Flutter Community Desktop Jam (Idea)

Shadowofhassen of the Ubuntu Flutter Community tells us about a “jam” for desktop applications built in flutter. We’re told the process is still a ‘work in progress’, with this post alerting us to the jam, and allowing us to check out details for more to become involved.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-flutter-community-desktop-jam-idea/54971

Anbox Cloud 1.25.0 has been released

Keirthana T S reports the release of Anbox Cloud 1.25.0 in these release notes. We’re told it’s a minor release, but we’re given links to read the component versions, requirements [for running Anbox Cloud], plus a list of new features and improvements. A list of CVEs fixed, the bugs dealt with, upgrade instructions & more is also provided.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/anbox-cloud-1-25-0-has-been-released/55082

Default favorite applications for new menu

Aaron Rainbolt tells us Lubuntu have switched to the Fancy Menu, and in this thread starts discussion on the ‘favorite applications’ provided on initial install.

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/default-favorite-applications-for-new-menu/55188

Canonical News

In the Blogosphere

Ubuntu 25.04’s GNOME Web Browser Will Be Able To Play More Web Videos By Default

Michael Larabel reports on a packaging change in GNOME’s Web browser ‘epiphany’ that will be of benefit to Ubuntu 25.04 users. We’re given a quote from Ubuntu’s Jeremy Bicha on the change which incorporates GStreamer’s ‘bad’ set of plugins which will allow the playing of more videos by default. Links for more details, a screenshot and more are provided.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Epiphany-Bad-Plugins

Systemd Adding The Ability to Boot Directly Into A Disk Image Downloaded Via HTTP

Michael Larabel writes that Lennart Poettering has been working on adding the ability for systemd to boot directly to a downloaded image within the initrd or linux boot process. Details: a link to the pull request, and to Lennart’s comments on Mastodon are provided.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/systemd-disk-image-boot-HTTP

GNOME’s Website Just Got a Major Redesign

Joey Sneddon alerts us to an updated GNOME website, declaring it a “solid improvement”. We’re given some description of the improvements, some screenshots, and of course the link so we can check it out for ourselves.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/02/gnome-website-revamp-goes-live

Wayland Color Management & HDR Protocol Support Merged

Michael Larabel provides this follow up post telling us the Wayland Color Management and HDR protocol support has now merged upstream. We’re told this includes over 800 review comments in the five years the work took to complete.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wayland-CM-HDR-Merged

Dynamic Triple Buffering Merged For GNOME 48

Michael Larabel reports the dynamic triple buffering support for GNOME’s Mutter compositor has merged in time for GNOME 48. With a link and quote from Canonical’s Daniel van Vugt, we’re told we’ll be able to use this in Ubuntu 25.04.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-48-Triple-Buffering

Ubuntu’s Icon Theme Fixing Its Not-So-Obvious ‘Bug’

Joey Sneddon tells us that some of the Ubuntu’s default Yaru theme icons were oversized, though Joey and many others never noticed. Joey shows us what the current sizing uses, and shows us how the square shape icons were “out of kilter”. Joey both describes the problem, and provides us with a GIF so we can actually see it for ourselves, before telling us the corrected version will be found in Ubuntu 25.04.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/02/ubuntus-icon-theme-resized

Other Articles of Interest

Featured Audio and Video

Ubuntu Portugal Podcast: Episode 336 - Especial FOSDEM 2025

“Mais uma vez cobrimos o maior dos eventos da comunidade de Software Livre e Open Source que acontece na Europa todos os anos: a FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting) - em Bruxelas, Bélgica, a 1 e 2 de Fevereiro. O Diogo não foi, como seria habitual, mas os nossos convidados estiveram por lá - por isso decidimos ouvir o André Alves, Gerardo Lisboa, Tiago Maurício e Tiago Carreira…”

https://podcastubuntuportugal.org/e336/

Updates and Security for Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, 24.04, and 24.10

Security Updates

Ubuntu 20.04 Updates

End of Standard Support: April 2025

Ubuntu 22.04 Updates

End of Standard Support: April 2027

Ubuntu 24.04 Updates

End of standard support: April 2029

Ubuntu 24.10 Updates

End of Life: July 2025

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Archive

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Further News

As always you can find more Ubuntu news and announcements at:

Conclusion

Thank you for reading the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.

See you next week!

Credits

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

  • Krytarik Raido
  • Bashing-om
  • Chris Guiver
  • Wild Man
  • Din Mušić - LXD
  • Cristovao Cordeiro (cjdc) - Rocks
  • And many others

Glossary of Terms

Other acronyms can be found at: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/glossary-uwn/42405

Get Involved

The Ubuntu community consists of individuals and teams, working on different aspects of the distribution, giving advice and technical support, and helping to promote Ubuntu to a wider audience. No contribution is too small, and anyone can help. It’s your chance to get in on all the community fun associated with developing and promoting Ubuntu. More on this at: https://community.ubuntu.com/contribute/

Or get involved with the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter team! We always need summary writers and editors, if you’re interested, learn more at: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/joining-the-ubuntu-weekly-newsletter-team/40929

Feedback

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