Ubuntu Core Desktop is Canonical’s (currently unreleased) immutable and attestable Linux desktop. It represents the most fundamental shift in Ubuntu’s desktop architecture to date, and will mature into the default experience for Ubuntu Desktop over time. Ubuntu Core is Canonical’s “immutable Linux” distribution, and has been deployed in numerous commercial IoT, embedded and robotics platforms for almost ten years. Canonical announced a developer preview of Core Desktop in 2023, but the project ...

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/58633410

Ubuntu Core Desktop is Canonical’s (currently unreleased) immutable and attestable Linux desktop. It represents the most fundamental shift in Ubuntu’s desktop architecture to date, and will mature into the default experience for Ubuntu Desktop over time.

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With this transition comes the promise of greater resilience, better security, more composability, but also more engineering complexity. In this post I’ll outline the vision, roadmap, and some of the complexities we hope to tackle.

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We want to build a modular desktop architecture that defines clear interfaces between components. Components such as the display manager, desktop environment, multimedia servers, networking and other core capabilities should adhere to well-defined interfaces and remain implementation agnostic.

The result will be a desktop whose constituent parts can evolve independently, without forcing the rebuild of the entire operating system image every time something changes - one of the key differentiators from other immutable operating system implementations.