Why we're still waiting for Canonical's immutable Ubuntu Core Desktop

Ubuntu Summit 2024 At this year's Ubuntu Summit in The Hague, we were really hoping to hear some news about Canonical's new immutable desktop distro.

It was a hot topic this time last year, and since it did not arrive alongside Noble Numbat in April, we were expecting it would appear alongside last month's Oracular Oriole – but no.

While an immutable desktop edition will be new for Canonical, it isn't being built entirely from the ground up. It will be based on the company's existing Ubuntu Core product. Core 24 shipped in June, and we previously took a high-level look at the previous release, Core 22.

Ubuntu Core is the company's existing low-maintenance, immutable distro for IoT devices. It connects to an Ubuntu Pro account and you manage it entirely remotely, to the extent that you can't log in locally on its own console. It's significantly cut down. The downloadable x86-64 VM image is only 448 MB. It has a read-only root file system, and it's built entirely from snap packages right down to the kernel – the traditional apt package manager is not included. It even downloads and installs its own updates, like the snapd daemon does on normal desktop Ubuntu. It's not something you install. It's distributed as a preinstalled disk image that you write to the target machines' boot media.

The idea is that it's as close to a fit-and-forget sort of product as possible, aspiring to the Zero Touch style of admin that The Register once called "the holy grail of enterprise deployment." This is very different from the ordinary desktop or server editions of Ubuntu, and the challenges of getting a graphical desktop environment running on top of this are substantial.

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