How long until I can selectively tell certain websites I'm a child so they stop showing me ads?

They wanted the personal computer to store and report personal information. I hope they have their best surprised faces ready for when computers report what the owner wants them to report.

How is that even remotely related?

The Linux implementation I've seen is the Freedesktop implementation that just responds to a user profile flag. There's no cryptography involved, it's just like asking for a room number like the adduser command does.

Edit: well except American states don't flag your operating system as illegal unless they ask for your room number. Canonical and all the other Linux companies really like being able to make money and not spend all of their earnings on lawyers.

Does anyone know of some good scripts or workflows to install Ubuntu (because it 'just works' e.g. comes with a lot of drivers) and then scale back to a Debian-like experience?

I've had issues starting with Debian because it doesn't ship with broad support for wifi hardware, and internet over USB to iphone hotspot also didn't work. The only option was to get wired ethernet to bring up wifi.

Also, one of the better uses of AI is fixing your Ubuntu distro (presumably not the only one) when it becomes unusable after an upgrade due to replacing your Nvidia drivers or somesuch.

I've installed Ubuntu 26.04 on a desktop I had lying around and things just work. It had 24.04 before, and the update barely registered as a concern. That desktop also ran Windows, and Ubuntu was incomparably snappy, to the point I felt that my typing speed was the bottleneck.

What I don't like about Ubuntu is the halfsnap, half apt nonsense.

> Luckily with a CLI-based AI, one can choose...

One can choose any Linux distro that has good installation and operator's instructions, such as Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Red Hat, etc, etc, etc, and follow those instructions.

It might be hard for some youngsters and hypesters to believe, but novices were installing and operating Linux on their home computers long before LLM research even began.

im out of the loop here, whats the last sentence referring to?

Or, you know, you can read the documentation and actually learn how to use your system. It isn't hard, dude.

I use it because I am very happy with the release schedule and the maturity. I don't want to use the latest greatest. I want something that works and has some manpower (and maybe money) behind it. I am not the biggest fan of snap but I know how to get around it.

Like most things, I imagine there are multiple audiences for Ubuntu. But for me:

- Inertia, I've used it for a long time.

- It's based on Debian. I like Debian and use it on servers.

- I chose it originally because it had better desktop support than Debian. It's possible that Debian is now also good, but see above...inertia.

- It (mostly) just works on a wide range of hardware, whilst remaining up-to-date with the latest Linux developments.

- I like the release cycles. Debian stable is too stable. Arch/Fedora/Debian-testing are too volatile. Ubuntu allows me to choose whether to follow the 9-month support window of a normal release; or the 5-year window of the LTS.

Everything above is highly subjective and by no means are other preferences invalid. All Linux distros are awesome in their own unique way.

I used to run Arch out of engineering school (that's what we used there), and loved it. But as I started working on my business, I started having less time to simply configure my OS and fight it on a few things. The breaking point for me, when I switched to Ubuntu Desktop, was not being able to connect to my two monitors via a dock (2 display ports). It simply took too much of my time to figure out all the nuances of evdi between my Thinkpad and my Dell monitors - Ubuntu just...worked (I could have spent more time understanding the issue, but I just needed it to work) But as I get older and am starting to rethink my tech stack, I'm strongly considering going back to my dear Arch

I use it because I like how it looks, it has sane defaults and is reliable. I am an "LTS to LTS" type person. My desktop pretty much looks like the default screenshots. Most of my customization comes through scripts and tools that I can install quickly after a reimage. Not a beginner.

I first touched it around 2010 and didn't like the desktop environment. Someone showed me the different flavors and I settled on XFCE (Xubuntu). I'm still using an Ubuntu flavor just for its APT repository. I'm of the unsubstantiated belief that if a distro has a large userbase, it will have a better maintained repository, so I will probably never leave.

I'm mostly a MacOS user now, but my Linux box is Ubuntu because that's just what I've been using. It's what I know, it's stable and just does what I want.

It used to be my "it just works" distro for systems I didn't want to spend time configuring, but they managed to make me feel like a second-class citizen as a not-enterprise-customer (not really anything specific, just a lot of small cuts).

I appreciate that they're running a business, but the Fedora/RHEL split feels much cleaner, and Fedora is my current go-to in instances where I used to reach for Ubuntu. (Or I use Debian, for headless/server setups)

Ubuntu Just Works and makes you update your OS once every five years if you use the free plan, ten years if you're not a business and use a free account, and even longer if you're a company. Not even Microsoft offers that.

It's also the reference OS for tons of free software out there.

At some point you just want something that works and is somewhat familiar, so sticking with a distro makes sense even when it becomes somewhat annoying.

I remember the early days of Linux when I'd be using a dial-up modem to overnight download Linus' hot-off-the-press kernel tarballs to build myself and update my system ... nowadays I just want a working computer with minimum fuss, and cost (else a MacBook might make more sense).

From my experience it feels like the "de facto" server choice for CICD jobs that can specify. I don't know why that is, possibly just that it's widely available.

Ubuntu do a lot of work bundling proprietary drivers I think- probably the reason a bunch of popular distros are built on top of it (pop-os, elementary, mint)

Hardware support.

Clueless companies with clueless IT departments that want someone to call when things break.

For the rest Ubuntu's only reason for being is that it's the basis of many good distros like Linux Mint.

I'm using lubuntu, but it just works, stable, solid, widespread support. no notes, no complaints

I like multipass.

If you are on nvidia Jetson, Ubuntu is basically a necessity.

Personally because DGX OS is forked from it and DGX Software Stack is supported out of the box. This is a dual 6000 Blackwell machine.

Other machines in the house are Mint.

i run it in wsl, main appeal is that I mostly run things on debian servers at work so I always feel at home when developing stuff

Ubuntu is basically a distro for very very experienced Linux users. It's simple to install and then everything just works, so you don't waste time pissing about typing in things from outdated wikis that might have been correct five years ago.

For engineering, most cloud VMs run Ubuntu/Debian.

Having it also on the desktop makes things, less compatibility issues.

> I'm curious what the audience is for Ubuntu nowadays? If you use it - why Ubuntu over another distro?

I would frame this the other way around. Why would anyone pick any other distro over Debian or Ubuntu?

I use it for work (and a homelab). For me, it's got more up-to-date versions of software than Debian and it's easy to search for solutions to issues as it's got a large user base.

I'm not a fan of the various redhat/centos distros as I've had issues in the past with RPM based distributions. It's possible to have problems with DEB based systems, but in my experience it's a lot easier to fix DEB systems than RPM ones.

For me it is inertia. I started using Ubuntu back in 2010. It works well enough that I haven‘t bothered to switch. I may finally switch if decide to fill to distro with AI crap.

Has the most packages, with the least quality of packaging.

Ubuntu for experimentation with Robotics/ROS2. Windows for experimentation with FPGA/Vivado. A dual-boot 14" Lenovo E14 to host the festivities.

I used lots of distros including Debian Sid, Arch, SUSE but Kubuntu was my first love and eventually I ended up with Kubuntu LTS , i no longer enjoy optimzing my kernel, bootspeed or other stuff, I hate GNOME philosophy so KDE was always my love. I run LTS since I do not want to run the latest bugs.

The audience is people that haven't realized that Ubuntu lost its way +10 years ago.

On a more positive note, the thing that causes me some temporary pain might still be awesome for the long-term success of GNU/Linux (or whatever we shall call it now, still looking for an updated pasta[1] recipe). As much as it was a little too early a little too move fast break stuff, I applaud Ubuntu for demanding the drop-in-replacement to be possible.

To get where they are now, uutils needed to do the thing nobody bothered to do for 30 years: proper cli unit tests, the kind with which you can compare busybox/toybox/GNU/uutils/Darwin without depending on implementation details [2]. This will net more future good than current harm. Even if the tools cannot be changed to have fewer nonsensical edge cases for compatibility reasons, at least now I can ask $currentLLM to write me a better manpage, one that includes the gotchas [3] and factual errors that the 1996 (partly updated in 2004) version still fails. And improve shellcheck so even those among future generations that still need the shell as we know it today are not bitten by its warts as much.

[1]: https://safereddit.com/r/copypasta/comments/av4rl9/what_your... [2]: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils-tracking [3]: https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-gotchas.html

This is for the .1 release which allows you to upgrade from the previous LTS.

I had the prompt on my work machine this morning which was previously running 24.04.x and is now on 26.04.1.

yes but this announcement is presumably about it being ungated for `do-release-upgrade` commands from existing 24.04 LTS installations.

[year].[month].[patch]

ubuntu does two releases in a year, one in april (26.04) and one in october (26.10 on october 15)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history

It came out in April. Their LTS releases always come out in April of even numbered years.

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.1 point release is when autoupgrade becomes available to 24.04 users and is usually roughly 3 months after April (.04) release).

> It's the release month, so 26.04 is April 2026. 26.10 lands in October.

26.04 is an LTS release, 26.10 will not be.