Ubuntu Core Desktop has been restarted with a dedicated team with plans

29 Oct 2026 at 10:49 am UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

Ubuntu Core Desktop is Canonical's immutable version of Ubuntu Linux, and they're back to working on it for desktop users. It may one day, eventually, replace the standard version of Ubuntu.

They originally announced an early preview of it back in 2023, but it has unfortunately not progressed very far and ended up going dormant. But now Canonical's Jon Seager (VP Engineering) announced in a forum post that it's being restarted with a dedicated team.

"Ubuntu Core moves to everything as a snap - including the bootloader, the kernel, the desktop environment, userspace daemons and all of your apps. For users, this means a desktop that’s harder to break, easier to recover and more adaptable to different devices and workflows. It also gives users greater control over the data their applications can access.

Our 2023 preview fell short of this vision. While it helped us better understand the problems we’d face, it bundled much of the desktop into a single alternative base snap. Separating those components is one of our top priorities as we restart the project.

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."

Part of this is to improve gaming too. Seager noted Valve's work on Proton, along with devices like the Steam Deck and Lenovo Legion Go becoming more popular (and SteamOS is an immutable distro).

"I want Ubuntu Core Desktop’s modular architecture to enable a more resilient and independently updatable gaming stack, including graphics components. Making that work reliably across games and hardware without destabilising the underlying system will be a complex task. The ability to compose snaps together, utilising ideas such as “content snaps” and snap components, enable us to be more agile in the distribution and integration of drivers across varying hardware and architectures than in other image-based approaches.

The Steam snap and its surrounding infrastructure haven’t had as much attention as I’d have liked over the past two years, mostly due to the same resource constraints that were preventing the Ubuntu Core Desktop project itself from progressing, but we’re now in a position to address that.

Developing Ubuntu Core Desktop for gaming devices gives us a chance to consider the general UX of the machine. In the case of a dedicated gaming device, booting directly into a traditional desktop environment might not be the best choice. This is a compelling reason to explore different modes of operation beyond the traditional workstation experience."

There's a lot more information available in the announcement, that I suggest you fully read through if you're interested. Nice to see it won't be limited to GNOME too, as they're working towards giving more choice on desktops there.

🌐 External Sources: discourse.ubuntu.com Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Distro News, Misc, Open Source, Ubuntu, Upcoming 7 Likes Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:Proton 11.0-2e brings EA App fixes, and there's a much bigger Proton 11.0-3 Release CandidateWarhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 is Steam Deck & Steam Machine Verified ahead of releaseFlathub walked back their generative AI ban, replaced with a disclosure policyBazzite Linux has a fresh stable update for October All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.