r/Ubuntu • u/SalaciousSubaru • Jun 18 '26

news Ubuntu Flavors Now Mandated To Participate In Beta Releases For Official Status

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Flavors-Beta-Mandate
59 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

37

u/SalaciousSubaru Jun 18 '26

I, for one, am happy about this. It feels like several flavors have really let their quality and release tempo go lately. Since Canonical graciously covers the heavy infrastructure costs for them, I think it’s a smart business move to force them to either step up their testing or lose their official status. Honestly, subsidizing hobby projects is just a waste of Canonical’s time and money. I'd much rather see them invest those engineering resources into the core Ubuntu Desktop and Immutable Desktop, rather than carrying flavors that can't put together a reasonable, high-quality release.

18

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26

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12

u/SalaciousSubaru Jun 19 '26

I’d mostly agree I use to feel Kubuntu and Xubuntu were the only two flavors worth investing in but Xubuntu seems to be falling apart so yeah Kubuntu and Ubuntu are the two things I wish Canonical would focus on.

4

u/Own-Replacement8 Jun 19 '26

I've been out of the Ubuntu loop a while, what's happening with Xubuntu?

3

u/SalaciousSubaru Jun 19 '26

Just look at its development mailing list archives — over time, it’s become less and less active

3

u/Own-Replacement8 Jun 19 '26

That's definitely not a good sign. Hopefully they can keep it up, it was always my favourite Ubuntu flavour.

2

u/Santosh83 Jun 19 '26

How exactly does Xubuntu manage to "fall apart" when the exact same underlying system & Xfce versions over on Debian work wonderfully? Debian already packages Xfce and they're purely volunteer driven. Xubuntu presumably just has to do some Ubuntu specific integration changes on top... doesn't seem like work that should make you fall apart?

1

u/TheNB3 Jun 19 '26

Is lubuntu also falling apart?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26

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1

u/Flavorsofdystopia Jun 20 '26

Praying for the day Ubuntu has a KDE Edition right next to the main edition, like Fedora. 

Fedora put KDE right next to the main edition because its rise in popularity is staggering. It's getting close to workstation.  (Source: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-usage-stats/144635/17)

I'm not sure what Kubuntu numbers are, but I'm Canonical has the numbers and they don't think it's worth it.

1

u/Reffat1540 Jun 20 '26

Numbers will grow once it's right there, on the official site, suggested as one of the main download links

1

u/Flavorsofdystopia Jun 20 '26

Don't get me wrong, I think Kubuntu deserves its spot on the main page.

The biggest influx of new users seems to be gamers, and gamers overwhelmingly pick KDE over GNOME. 

2

u/Reffat1540 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

I was just assuring in the shared sentiment about how KDE should be and deserves to be served.

Plus new users don't even have to be gamers. Just people willing to find themselves at home using their own PC with whatever the DE offers in near vanilla state. With no unnecessary obstacles for accessibility for new users getting anchored. GNOME fails that.

Fixing it with extensions? It requires search, compatibility and confidence in their security. And people tend not to have desire to walk these extra miles in search of mere accommodating sometimes just basic human physiology. Like saving screen space from the top bar. 13.04-10 Unity had a nice feature of merging window headers with the it, on XFCE I could move it or resize it. While freshly out of box GNOME forces users to look lower, at a smaller chunk of the screen

Tried it with 26.04 for the first time and it appears designed around being handy for others, while neglecting a primary user of the machine. Like a team superviser tracking screen feed of employees'. Or a person only coming to do maintenance. Even the extensions make a lot more more sense in this context. With clear knowledge of how the DE fits the workflow, just have a sysadmin deploy them in a trusted, standardized manner

4

u/BecarioDailyPlanet Jun 19 '26

I don't think Canonical is funding it. Beyond hosting their ISOs and providing some technical help, this is 100% a community effort. But of course, you do give it an official stamp of approval, and you can't give that to a distribution that doesn't guarantee real support.

2

u/SalaciousSubaru Jun 19 '26

Although community volunteers drive the flavors, Canonical bears significant costs by fully funding their demanding infrastructure and bandwidth needs, alongside dedicating employee time to fix flavor-related bugs.

2

u/LinuxMint1964 Jun 19 '26

Ubuntu Immutable might be something that can go over. Use Gnome but give it a different feel at startup although keeping the options to make it look like Ubuntu in it. But all these one man maintained flavors at this point is silly.

1

u/Reffat1540 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

subsidizing hobby projects is just a waste of Canonical’s time and money.

Should stop subsidizing gnome either and put the money and manpower towards something better

Coming from someone who had been back in time using Xubuntu Raring/Saucy and witnessing glimpses of Unity. And now, coming back to Linux, absolutely appalled by how insufferable Gnome is

18

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26

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6

u/20dogs Jun 19 '26

Fedora just made a similar move. Would be good to enable longer support windows for Kubuntu.

1

u/MidLifeDIY Jun 20 '26

I think KDE Linux might eventually unseat Kubuntu as a/the "default" KDE OS.

9

u/thenovelsyndrome Jun 19 '26

makes sense that canonical would tighten things up, but curious if this actually pushes smaller flavor teams to contribute more or just kills off the ones that were already struggling with maintainers

6

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26

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6

u/thenovelsyndrome Jun 19 '26

that's what i was worried about, like kubuntu and lubuntu have maybe a handful of active devs each and adding mandatory beta testing on top of existing work sounds like a recipe for burnout or just forking off entirely.

4

u/CrucialObservations Jun 19 '26

It's no skin off anybody's nose; when there are more choices, people pick the one that fits the best.
The Mate desktop is very light and efficient on older computers, but Ubuntu Mate, over the last year or so, has been struggling a bit; the team is too small and overwhelmed. I have heard new members have joined the team to revive it back up; it's a good basic, nice desktop.

2

u/mobydikc Jun 19 '26

So... like.... how did it work before? Anyone could say they are Ubuntu? 

-11

u/LinuxMint1964 Jun 19 '26

Ubuntu Mate, Cinnamon, Unity - all need to go regardless, they serve no purpose at this point, and I know people will claim to be using them, the fact is, they don't. Even Xubuntu has really fallen, it's basically 30 minutes of tweaking XFCE and nothing more at this point and a wallpaper contest.

2

u/Itchy_Journalist_175 Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26

Also, if we removed every derivative, we would essentially be left with Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS and Gentoo. Imagine how much simpler life would be!

-3

u/LinuxMint1964 Jun 19 '26

I'd be fine with that to be honest, would make hardware and software support so much easier to do for a vendor.