Ubuntu Server Exploring A New Installer & More

Dustin Kirkland, the leader of product manager at Canonical, recently asked the folks at HackerNews what they would like to see done for Ubuntu 17.10. He's collected their feedback and offered a few insights into the current happenings.

He received more than one thousand comments of feedback and can be viewed via this HN post. Today Dustin wrote a blog post to organize the feedback and share some thoughts on some of the ideas.

Some of the highlights are summarized below:

- There's a new Ubuntu Server installer in the works, dubbed Subiquity, that sounds like it's coming down the pipe as an alternative to the Debian Installer. (Ubiquity is the name of their desktop installer, so likely for server-ubiquity).

- Better swap handling is being worked on still. Ubuntu 17.04 switches from using a swap partition to swap file, but more tuning to come.

- While Dustin has a long history with eCryptfs, they are putting their weight behind EXT4's native file encryption support for the future.

- There are some "skunkworks" projects going on investigating the possibility for ZFS as a root file-system on Ubuntu.

- The problem of old kernel builds filling up /boot is an issue they hope to address for Ubuntu 17.10.

- More efforts around rolling/faster/safer/easier updates by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

- Support for voice commands (ala Google Home, Alexa, Siri, etc) was deemed an excellent suggestion (does anyone remember when the Ubuntu voice support for Unity was talked about long ago?).

- A night mode / red shift mode for changing the screen colors at night as part of Ubuntu will be investigated.

- Better VPN support on Ubuntu is a possibility.

- They are working with NVIDIA on a couple initiatives to improve GPU support on the Ubuntu desktop and servers.

- Acknowledging the call for Ubuntu on GNOME and Wayland rather than Unity 8 and Mir, which was announced yesterday by Mark.

You can read Dustin's comments in full via his blog.