OSes

Ubuntu 26.04 beta arrives packing GNOME 50, which no longer supports Google Drive

Yep, you read that right. And there's no official Linux client from Google

Canonical has just released the beta of the next Ubuntu LTS – but what's grabbed the attention of many is that it features GNOME 50 as its default desktop environment. And GNOME 50 no longer supports Google Drive.

This will be a significant downside not just for Ubuntu – the world's most popular Linux distro, which runs on a significant number of web servers and developer environments – but for any and all distros that have updated to the GNOME 50 desktop.

Since there's no official Linux client from Google, this is a serious omission. There are third-party tools that let Linux connect, including Rclone, the FUSE connector google-drive-ocamlfuse, and the paid-for Insync, but all require extra work.

When we looked at GNOME 50, we praised its integration with cloud groupware, and only later learned about the Google Drive issue. We've asked Canonical to comment.

In the meantime, the Ubuntu team is continuing to gear up to unleash Resolute Raccoon, and the next LTS is getting a test run in the form of the 26.04 beta. It has also announced some of the directions that 26.10 will take in six months, some of which we suspect will be less welcome than others.

There are some pleasingly round numbers in Ubuntu 26.04. It uses the still-not-yet-final kernel 7.0, and as we mentioned, the desktop version will use the recently released GNOME 50 – so that means no X11 session is available, although X11 apps still work fine under the Wayland-only GNOME desktop using Xwayland. Nvidia users get driver version 590, and everyone using a GUI gets Mesa 26. Kubuntu 26.04 users get KDE Plasma 6.6, and Xubuntu 26.04 comes with Xfce 4.20.7.

The loading screen has a new boot spinner animation, and the default Yaru theme makes text very slightly bolder again by default. The GNOME overview screen can now search Snap packages and the web – locally, to avoid reigniting the Amazon search furore from 2012. Ubuntu's App Center software store can now handle .deb packages, and the Security Center can now manage Ubuntu Pro subscriptions and the TPM-based full-disk encryption that reappeared in the last interim release. The hefty linux-firmware package has been modularized into over a dozen sub-packages, fixing bug #1958518 which has been open since before Ubuntu Jammy in 2022. The new Rust sudo command now shows an asterisk for each character in your password, which violates a long tradition but makes life a little easier.

We gave the new version a quick spin in VirtualBox, and aside from automatically updating the installation program, it looks pretty much ready. Depending on which version you might be upgrading from, there are documentation pages to explain what's changed since 25.10 Questing, and what's changed since 24.04 Noble.

We also tried the beta of Xubuntu 26.04, which is the 20th anniversary release. For us, Xfce is the sweet spot in the world of Linux desktops: all the functionality and customizability of the more famous desktops, but smaller, simpler, and faster. Xubuntu 26.04 has Xfce 4.20.7, the latest update to the end 2024 release.

Although Rudra Saraswat, the project leader of Ubuntu Unity, is away at university and as a result there was no Ubuntu Unity 25.10, the flavor is not dead: there is a beta of Ubuntu Unity 26.04 – although it is not a long-term support edition, and the project homepage recommends staying on 24.04 for now. We tried the Unity beta ISO, which uses the Calamares installation program. It does still have a few glitches: for instance, it still uses the Questing wallpaper, and the Nemo file manager doesn't use the global menu bar, but it's there and it works.

It must be said that in the last few years, snap has gotten a lot faster: even on our 15-year-old kit, it works very well now. Around the Ubuntu 22.04 time frame, this vulture ran a carefully hand-tuned snap-free system, populated with native packages managed with deb-get. We've changed our mind since then: we've stopped fighting the OS and use snap packages of most of our add-on tools, plus a few AppImages. For things that need lower-level OS access, you can use the extrepo command to enable the Mozilla .deb repository. For the current Firefox, you still need to pin the APT repository, following Mozilla's own documentation. Otherwise, Ubuntu will automatically add the snap – as well as snapd and all the support framework. This doesn't apply if you install firefox-esr, though. The snap format is a common complaint about Ubuntu, and starting with a minimal install of one of the Qt variants or the Unity edition is an easy way to avoid it.

As we noted for the previous Xubuntu LTS version, the "Minimal installation" option in Xubuntu really is minimal: there's no web browser, and that means that there's no snapd daemon either. The same goes for the Ubuntu Unity beta, too.

What's coming in 26.10

The next interim release of Ubuntu after "Resolute" hasn't been named yet, but there are some early signs of what will change.

The "oxidization" is planned to continue: the plan is to replace the venerable C-based NTP daemon with the new Rust-based ntpd-rs. (This is presumably not great news for Eric Raymond's NTPsec project.)

Developer Julius Klode has appeared on The Register a few times. We've covered his work on KeepassXC, and Debian's APT, as well as issues with Ubuntu's new Rust coreutils.

He has stepped into the limelight again with a proposal on Discourse. In Ubuntu, Klode works on the special signed version of GRUB for machines with Secure Boot enabled. He suggests doing serious simplification to this version in Ubuntu 26.10. He's suggesting removing an assortment of the GRUB bootloader's more advanced features, including advanced filesystems such as Btrfs, XFS, and ZFS, plus removing RAID support, background image support and more. It's already proving controversial, so this may not happen.

Finally, for now, Ubuntu MATE project leader Martin Wimpress is stepping down, saying "my interests are elsewhere." One part of this is his new Nøughty Linux project. He presented a talk about the project at the most recent Ubuntu Summit, and its GitHub page reveals a little more. ®