Canonical Aiming For A New Desktop Installer With Ubuntu 21.10

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 1 February 2021 at 02:04 PM EST. 35 Comments
UBUNTU
Canonical has been working on developing a new desktop installer built around Google's Flutter toolkit and they aim to introduce it later this year in Ubuntu 21.10.

The past few years there has been talk of overhauling Ubuntu's desktop installer as "Ubiquity-NG" and in particular leveraging Curtin and Subiquity efforts that went in to Ubuntu's new server installer that has been in use for the past three years. That Curtin-based installer is finally close to entering the spotlight with plans to make it the new desktop installer with Ubuntu 21.10.

The new installer leverages Curtin as is used by Subiquity to provide more unified Ubuntu install infrastructure across desktops and servers. The user-interface of the new desktop installer will be using Flutter, which Canonical has been working with Google on for supporting under Linux.


This new Ubuntu desktop installer will be available in Ubuntu 21.10 though not necessarily replacing Ubiquity -- the existing installer will remain available at least for the 21.10 cycle. The hope is to have this new installer ready to go and fully tuned by the time of Ubuntu 22.04 given that it's a Long Term Support release.

The brief plans of pushing the new Ubuntu installer for the 21.10 cycle were laid out on the Ubuntu Discourse.
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