The beta version of this year's Ubuntu LTS release is out, complete with a new, and automatable, installation program.

The beta version of Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat is out, just a couple of weeks before the planned release date. It's a little behind schedule as the developers decided to rebuild all its packages because of the xz/liblzma security hole, which the Reg covered last month.

Some of the new features are things that will also be in other distros: "Noble" includes GNOME 46, which we looked at in February, and is based on kernel 6.8, which after some delays of its own finally débuted last month. As usual, Canonical has customized the experience more than many distros with a dozen preloaded extensions, of which four are active by default: its dock, application indicators, desktop icons, and a Windows-inspired tiling assistant which can tile windows into quarters of the screen. GNOME still breaks this grumpy old vulture's muscle memory, but Ubuntu's configuration is one of the better ones.

If you do a clean install, one of the first things you'll see is the new installation program. It offers some accessibility options right at the beginning, which is always good, and asks if you have a YAML file with which to customize the setup. Feed it the URL to your ready-rolled config and it will do the rest, which will be handy if you're deploying multiple machines. Also YAML-driven is the Netplan network-configuration tool, which hits version 1.0 in this release. Those who prefer static IPs and to manage their own DNS may well like this release even less than before.

This version defaults to a minimal installation, so if you want the extra applications which Ubuntu used to include as standard, such as LibreOffice, email, chat and media clients, you must choose the "extended selection." If you do, there are some changes: Thunderbird is now a Snap package, the Cheese webcam viewer has been replaced, and the GNOME Games compilation has gone. Even so, the Noble beta is a whopping 5.64GB download.

This release has a new app-store called the Ubuntu App Center, which focuses on Snap applications - this version 1.0.0 doesn't handle plain old .deb packages at all. Canonical continues to lean into its controversial snap packaging format, and in Noble, the Thunderbird email client is now packaged this way. However, its new Core Desktop offering, planned to appear with this release, hit some delays some months back and won't be included.

Alongside the new App Center, there's also a Firmware Update tool app included. This is good news: a lot of weird little problems faced by people running anything other than Windows can be resolved by just updating the system firmware. In his prior role, the Reg FOSS desk inherited a desktop workstation that was still on its 1.0 ROM, and updating bumped that by some 17 releases and took about three minutes off the time it took to POST. Although widely neglected, it's well worth doing. We suspect that like most Linux firmware tools, though, this will only work if you boot in UEFI mode.

In theory, the newer kernel and drivers will mean that Noble performs better on newer hardware. Saying that, though, a full ("Extended") installation of the beta version takes about 11GB of disk space and a gig of RAM at idle. This is not an especially lightweight distro any more, and will need a capable PC to perform well. It defaults to a Wayland session, and we saw screen corruption issues in VirtualBox using the guest additions from Ubuntu's own repository.

If you're running the previous LTS, you won't get nagged to upgrade until 24.04.1 is out in a few months' time. We definitely do not recommend upgrading working systems to it yet, nor should you run beta releases in production. If you're that impatient for the latest components - and you don't want Ubuntu Pro - then either run interim releases, or a different distro.

We suspect that some folks running the current LTS may hit some difficulties - indeed, those running the HWE stack may already be having problems. If you have an nVidia card, most of nVidia's legacy drivers won't install or run properly on kernel 6.8. This vulture owns several older Thinkpad laptops with on-board nVidia GPUs and nVidia Optimus switching. These nVidia chips can't be replaced, but they no longer work with kernel 6.5 in Ubuntu 23.10… which was pushed out to 22.04 users earlier this year.

We didn't realize this at the time, but we think that was the cause of the display corruption we saw while upgrading to 23.10 on a Thinkpad T420. This means they'll never work properly with Wayland, either, as it needed much more recent nVidia drivers. Although still very capable, these are decade-old machines now, and we suspect Canonical isn't testing against anything that old. They have far better keyboards than any newer Lenovo offerings, so it's sad to see them hit the end of their useful lives. To be fair, it's not really Canonical's fault: the issues are not confined to Ubuntu, and the machines don't work with Debian 12 either, let alone any distros with even newer components.

After its abbreviated release cycle, Ubuntu "Noble" should be out by about the 24th of April, along with all its official remixes. If you want to monitor progress, the work-in-progress release notes for 24.04 will tell you more. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/04/15/ubuntu_24_04_belated_beta/