Immutability is in fashion. Well, partly. There are several projects that are moving in that direction, such as the new Fedora Spin Desktop, and others who were already born with that characteristic as one of their reasons for being, such as BlendOS. Canonical is experimenting with that, and is expected to release Ubuntu Core Desktop in the not too distant future.
In fact, Ubuntu Core Desktop was expected to arrive this April, but right now it has a lot of problems to fix and It has been delayed, at least, until October. When we can use it, what will we get? We explain it to you.
Ubuntu Core Desktop can now be tested
As we explain in this article, Ubuntu Core Desktop you can try now. The name that appears on the screen while it is loading and in screenshots like the one at the head of this article we read only "Ubuntu Core", but we add the "Desktop" behind it because that is how we have read it in different media and because only "Ubuntu Core" is also the option for the Internet of things (IoT). What you have to do is go to the page we indicated, download an image and run it from a USB or a virtual machine. It has to boot into EFI mode for it to boot.
When you start it will do a kind of installation, which is rather to prepare the image. When entering the operating system we will have to indicate a keyboard layout, which at the time of writing this article has a bug and does not allow us to check if we have chosen it correctly or not, it will ask us to connect to the Internet, a username and password, etc. . It is practically the same as when we install the normal system, with the difference that when we configure all the parameters we will enter the operating system itself. And the keyboard now works in the chosen layout.
When you open the terminal and enter the password, you will see a long message that explains what Ubuntu Core is: a “mini transactional edition of Ubuntu.” designed for minimal use, for virtual machines and firmware. Whether we can open the terminal is something that comes and goes, since I was able to open it months ago, there are people who say that the app was deleted and now it is available again.
Limited, snap-based, unbreakable system
The message also mentions the classic DEB-based version, the option to choose if we want the complete experience. This Ubuntu Core Desktop is for those who prefer to have something that they can't mess up by installing packages and doing a lot of configurations, and The software that you can use is basically what is in Snapcraft.
Actually, not even that. There will be packages that cannot be installed, like Visual Studio Code, or at least that's how it is today. If we write sudo snap install code, it will throw us an error informing us that this type of package requires "classic confinement that is only available on classic systems", or that is Canonical's version. Fedora Atomic Desktops can install it.
And is that Canonical is the owner, master and lord of snap packages, and does not plan to support flatpaks in any way. That puts it behind the competition by offering fewer options, and if not being able to install some snaps wasn't enough, you can't add support for anything else. A range of possibilities would open up if AppImages could be launched, but since the libfuse2 package, necessary to open these packages, is in the official repositories, you have to use APT and APT is not available, AppImages cannot be opened either.
Workshops?
The truth is that it seems that Canonical is saving something, but at the moment there is no information about it. Available as a kind of application with a terminal icon, we find Workshops. When we open it, we see something like the following:
Although it is not clear how to use it, it seems clear that it is a program for running software in containers. We will know more in the coming months.
Is still in development
All of this is the case today, and we won't know 100% sure what Ubuntu Core Desktop will be like until its first stable version is released. With Canonical behind, it is clear that support for flatpak packages will not arrive, but it doesn't seem far-fetched for them to add the libfuse2 package to Ubuntu Core Desktop so it can do something else.
By default we do have a browser, LibreOffice, Thunderbird and VLC can be installed, which allow it to offer a fair experience, as indicated by the message on the terminal. Now, if you need software like Visual Studio Code or libraries like FFmpeg or ImageMagick, it is not an option.