 It seems like immutable Linux distributions are all the rage these days and a few weeks ago we got some big news from Ubuntu that they are actually working on an immutable distribution that will be snap based if I switch over to the desktop here. About a month ago they released this announcement that an all snap Ubuntu desktop edition is coming and that it should arrive by the next LTS release. So the next LTS release will be 24.04 so April of next year you will have your standard classic deb based version of Ubuntu but you will also have this new immutable snap based build that is available to experiment with. Now this is probably going to be you know beta quality software even when it's released next year. Certainly right now it will be very alpha quality software but if you wanted to test this thing out there are actual builds of Ubuntu core desktop which is what this will be. Now Ubuntu core has been around for a number of years so Ubuntu has an edition called Ubuntu core that is designed for IoT devices it's snap based and it's been around like six or seven years but it's not really designed to be used on a desktop computer with a desktop environment and you know all of that. But now they're working on this new project Ubuntu core desktop and if you go to their GitHub page you can actually find builds of this that you could try out install it in a virtual machine and see what you think and that's what I'm going to do. So over on their GitHub if I go to actions and under actions what we need to do is find any post where they've actually built an image and you can actually filter that with build image here which most of these posts are build image related posts so I'll just go to the latest one here and if I click on it if you're logged into GitHub you should see a heading here called artifacts and under artifacts you have an image that was built and if you click on the image it's this one is 1.74 gigabytes in size image dot zip will be the name of the zip file let me go ahead and save that because it's only 1.7 gigs in size this should just take a few seconds to download and that finished downloading so let me switch desktops here let me open my graphical file manager and I'm going to navigate to my downloads folder where image dot zip was downloaded I'm going to right click on it and I need to open this in some kind of extraction tools some kind of archive management tool like if you're on GNOME you have file roller which is your archive tool or x archiver I've got installed I also have pzip which is a fantastic piece of free and open source software let me open pzip let me take a second to open because it has to read this rather large archive now inside image dot zip you have pc dot tar dot gz if I click on it inside the pc dot tar dot gz I should have another file and it took a few seconds for the second uh window here in pzip to open but you can see now I have pc dot img and a dot img is something we can actually work with in a virtual machine we could actually convert that to a vdi file for example and actually boot directly off of vdi a virtual disk image inside virtual box so what I'm going to do let's extract this one file here because that's the only thing I need I need this dot img file so I'm going to extract the selected object and I'm going to extract it to by default it's going to extract it to slash temp which makes sense because it's going to be a very big file and it'll get rid of it if you never do anything with it if it's in temp but I'm actually going to permanently put it in my downloads folder so let me choose that and hit okay take a few seconds to extract that and now that that is finished let me close pzip out and you can see I have pc.img now in my downloads directory so let me open a terminal and I'm going to zoom in let me cd into downloads I'm going to run this command here vbox manage with capital v b and m vbox manage is the name of the program we're running convert from moral dash dash format vdi so we're converting uh to a vdi image we're converting pc.img which is in this directory we're converting it over to pc.vdi which is the virtual box disk image it's what virtual box can read as a virtual hard drive once we convert the dot img to vdi all we have to do is create a virtual box virtual machine and mount the vdi image like it's a hard drive and boom you've got your a boom two core desktop live image so let's go ahead and make that conversion and this will take a little time and it completed and you can see the fish shill tells me it completed that conversion in 29 seconds let me close that out and now we have pc.vdi so now let's go ahead and create our virtual box virtual machine so let me switch to this workspace where I typically have my virtual machines and I'm going to go ahead and create a new machine I'll name this a boom two core desktop and for the iso we're not going to have an iso because we're just going to mount a vdi image later type linux version of boom 264 bit yeah all of that is good let me click next I'll give this vm six gigs of ram I'll give it two threads my 24 threads cpu uh disk size we really don't need a virtual disk size because we're actually going to use an existing disk let me search for the existing disk so I'll click add let me go to my downloads directory and let's add pc.vdi now let's click next we get a summary let's finish now we've created our virtual machine before I do anything else though I do need to go into settings because a boom two core desktop will not work unless we go into system and turn on enable efi it has to be efi and that's one of the reasons why I'm using virtual box for this vm's because virtual box makes this easy you just tick on that box the other thing I want to quickly do is go into display and give it the maximum video memory that virtual box will let us hear 128 megabytes and then audio just for purposes of me recording I don't want any audio in the vm because sometimes it'll conflict with the audio on my host machine so typically I turn the audio off so I'll do a null audio driver and let me click okay and that's just for me because I'm recording if you don't have to play with the audio settings if you're just testing this out on your machine and if all of this works correctly I should be able to actually boot this now I do get some error messages but then the screen went away so I do think it is booting virtual box here and this is the think the efi portion of virtual box booting up here it's a system d message here and it is hung on this one system d message here failed to write slash etsy slash machine id it's been stuck on this for nearly a minute now but it does look like it's going to get past it all right and then we get the Ubuntu core splash screen I think it is going to work now the first time you load this I believe it is going to take a few minutes to actually set up the system yeah and you can see it's starting the system because everything is snap based containerized right here all the snaps are containers you're going to see some some output here at the bottom of the screen you can see it's going to mount all the snaps I'll pause the video I'll be back in a couple of minutes once it finishes this setup here and it finished the setup that took a couple of minutes and then as soon as it finishes that it boots you directly inside a live genome environment and starts this setup screen which you guys have seen on the standard desktop of Ubuntu you can see welcome to Ubuntu core 22 start setup and this is where you need to go ahead and set up a keyboard layout and all of this I am using English I need English us so let me search the list English us and then click next privacy I'll leave all of the geo location stuff turned off time zone let me choose the central time zone in the US and then I'll click next and then connect our online accounts I'll skip all of that then we need to create our user my user will be DT click next let's set up a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then repeat the strong and complicated password and then click next and then start using Ubuntu core now let me fix the screen resolution here once it finally loads up I won't make this a full 1920 by 1080 resolution because honestly I'm not going to do much with it so but I do want to make it a little bigger it looks like a search for display doesn't do anything let me just search for settings and then in settings I should have displays yeah that is a bit of a bug I think that the displays does not show up in like the GNOME dash let me do a 1360 by 768 kind of like a laptop screen resolution here right and so this will be a little smaller keep changes but at least you will be able to see the entire screen here so let's get out of that one other thing I probably want to do this is a very large panel on the side so let's go into appearance I want a dark mode turned on and I want the dock so that 48 pixels wide let's shrink that down to about 32 that seems yeah much more normal we got our home directory here which I really don't need the right click desktop icon settings you know like GNOME seems to work beautifully here on the snap based version of GNOME let's go ahead position of icons show personal folder let's turn that off yeah and now all of that is gone now I'm not going to do much with this for one thing it's very early days it's very alpha quality kind of software and I don't know much about it there actually isn't much written about it over on the github so but I can control all t to open a terminal you can say to run a command as administrator you need to use sudo that's nice but it does not load the bash rc permission denied right so that is kind of weird so does sudo actually work could I sudo vi the dot bash rc uh no so apparently it says use sudo if you need group permissions but apparently sudo is not allowed that's interesting as I don't know if that is normal let's do a uname dash r so the kernel on this is 5.15 so that's an older kernel an LTS kernel and if I did a apt list space dash install to get a list of everything that was installed with the apt package manager would it actually return anything no it actually will not because apt that command is not found but if I do a snap list to list all the snaps installed and it's hanging for a moment I don't know if that's because it has to return a lot of output or if that command it doesn't like yeah again it's very alpha quality software and I'm sure they probably don't want you managing snaps at the command line like this for one thing your standard snap command is not built for an immutable file system right so I'm sure that this is not the correct way to do this if I did an LSBLK to see all the snaps that are mounted and now let me zoom back out I'll zoom way out I know you guys can't read this but this is just to show you how many snaps are actually mounted so here's the loopback devices it looks like there's 24 that are currently mounted as loops 25 since they start counting at zero and if you wanted your LSBLK command to not have all of that loopback device I've showed this before all you need to do on any Linux distribution LSBLK space dash e space seven and it will eliminate all the loopback devices that were part of that output although you're still going to have a ton of stuff mounted here I'll have to zoom out so you can even see that so LSBLK dash e7 got rid of all the loops but you can see the partition scheme they've got one two three four five partitions and a lot of mounts so I can't do much in the terminal as far as package management stuff it does the apt is not here and snap the snap command doesn't look like it does much the help for snap works but could I snap install htop because I know htop is available as a snap this error cannot communicate with the server yeah and you know some of this makes sense why you know I can't edit my bash rc or why I can't install htop or whatever the whole point of an immutable distribution of course is that nothing ever changes so it's a little bit of a different kind of situation with these immutable distributions I'm going to move the snap store the software center over to the dock because I imagine that this is actually probably the proper way to get software so let's launch the software center here and let's actually try to install something so htop again I know it's available as a snap there it is I click on it I click install you can see it's going to install it as a snap from latest stable give it my sudo password and all those snap install htop in the terminal doesn't work which I kind of expected it does look like it works just fine here in the graphical software center I'm sure there's command line ways of doing that as well I just didn't take the time to look those up but now if I go back to the terminal and run htop htop the command is not there I wonder if it created a desktop file for htop it did so it's in our menu system if I click on it it looks like it ran for a second and then crashed so yeah but again alpha quality software and one of the problems with me trying to install software too I don't have much storage here I converted that .img to a vdi virtual box disk image but I don't know how much space is available on that htop was probably okay if I try to install anything bigger I don't know if I would run out of space or not but we'll just leave that for now let me go back to settings let's get some more information from the GNOME settings here if I go to about you can see disk capacity unknown OS name Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit the GNOME version by the way 42.5 the windowing system of course is Wayland here I get out of that if I right click on the desktop let's change a wallpaper just to verify that that actually works oh we'll go with the flower yeah changing wallpaper and everything like that works as expected look at the file manager the file manager yeah seems to open just fine actually as far as speed and performance everything seems to be working as expected I know some people often ask about the speed of snaps I've never really had a problem with the speed of snaps now I don't use Ubuntu I know typically the people that complain about snaps are using snaps on Ubuntu and sometimes in the past Ubuntu the speed of the snaps on their distribution for whatever reason seemed a little slow I know I've had a problem in the past before we like the speed of Firefox opening so let's try Firefox because I haven't opened it now web browsers typically take a couple of seconds to load anyway yeah I mean that wasn't that wasn't bad right the file manager which we opened earlier it takes just a couple of seconds that's not too bad let's see what else I really don't have much here other than the terminal which we've already opened let's see how the snap calendar or our calculator that is launches takes a second or two but again I'm not sure that that's any different than the non-containerized packaging of these particular programs well this is just a very quick and very very early look at Ubuntu core desktop now obviously I can't do much with it there's not much installed and I can't really install much I didn't add any storage to this virtual machine and you can see I don't know how to actually do a lot of stuff because if you go back to the github page for Ubuntu core desktop with their github page it's got information about how to test things out in virtual machines right to get a virtual machine up and running but what it doesn't do is it doesn't really tell me like how to actually do things like nothing works in the terminal every command you enter in the terminal pretty much says command not found so I don't know how to actually run commands in the terminal like there's just I can't find any information about it here and the fact that sudo wasn't working you know I don't even know if vi was working could I actually edit anything without sudo privileges let me do a control alt t once again and zoom in could I just do vi on the bash rc without sudo privileges uh I can but the bash rc is an empty file is that right let's do a ls-la bash there is a bash rc here it is not an empty file though because it is 3771 bytes so why it's just weird yeah I'm not sure exactly how this works could I cat the dot bash rc it says permission denied yeah so there's some permission issues here again I'm sure that's associated with the fact that this is supposed to be a mutable a mutable means you really can't change anything so I will link to the github page in the description down below this video for those of you that want to maybe test this thing out spin up a virtual machine of your own and maybe play with it maybe you guys get a little further with it than I do maybe some of you guys will be interested in helping develop a boon to core desktop I'm sure they would appreciate any help from the community now before I go I need to thank a few special people I need to thank the producers of this episode Gabe James Maxim my homies to bald matte amendment Mitchell Paul royal west armor dragon bash potato chuck commander rary george lee marstrom methos and eight erion paul peace watch them adore polytech realities for less red profit rolling tools that would williams in a bit these guys they're my house tiered patrons over on patreon without these guys this quick alpha look of a boon to core desktop would not have been possible the show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen all these names you're seeing on the screen these are all my supporters over on patreon I don't have any corporate sponsors I'm sponsored by you guys the community if you like my work want to see more videos about linux and free and open source software subscribe to distro tube over on patreon peace