Jean Baptiste Lallement was recently appointed at Canonical as the new Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop. Jean Baptiste Lallement has a decade and a half history at Canonical working on Ubuntu QA, Ubuntu Phone / Unity, and other projects while now he is leading the charge on further enhancing the Ubuntu desktop initiatives. As somewhat of a mid-point for the Ubuntu 25.04 cycle, he published a Discourse post on Friday to outline some of the recent and ongoing improvements for the Ubuntu desktop.
As previously covered, Ubuntu 25.04 will be using the GNOME 48 desktop by default. There are a wealth of upstream improvements to find with GNOME 48 that make it a very exciting release. Ubuntu is also replacing Evince with Papers as the default PDF reader, among other changes.
Ubuntu 25.04 on the desktop side is also transitioning to BeaconDB for their geo-location service after Mozilla announced the retirement of their platform.
Ubuntu also continues to evolve its modern desktop installer. In particular, they are working on advanced partitioning options, more encrypted install options, and also better coping with systems having BitLocker-encrypted Windows 11 installations. With existing Ubuntu desktop installations, the installer has bailed out when sensing BitLocker-enabled Windows installations.
The current handling of the Ubuntu desktop installer when hitting a BitLocker-enabled Windows installation on the system has been a frustrating nuisance… Especially if just wanting to blow away the Windows OEM installation on a new system.
Canonical is also making it easier to auto-install Ubuntu across a fleet of desktop systems using their Landscape service.
Ubuntu 25.04 is also working on more changes under the hood for Ubuntu Core, continued enhancements for enterprise users of Ubuntu Linux, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) advancements on Windows 11 like supporting the new Tar-based WSL distribution format.
Those wanting to learn more about these Ubuntu desktop happenings can do so via this Ubuntu Discourse post.