Ubuntu 23.04: a Flutter installer, GNOME 44, and nine months of support

Ubuntu 23.04 is the 38th release signed by Canonical. It is an interim release, which is the first thing to know about it: nine months of updates, security patches and critical fixes, and then you move.

That support window decides who this release is for before any feature does.

The installer was rewritten

The headline change is not on the desktop, it is in front of it. The OS installer has been rebuilt in Google’s Dart language using Flutter, Google’s cross-platform UI framework.

An installer is an odd place to find Flutter. It is also a reasonable one: Canonical needs the same installer flow to work across desktop, server and subiquity’s existing tooling, and a cross-platform UI toolkit is a defensible answer to that. Whether Dart and Flutter belong at the base of a Linux distribution is a longer argument, and one worth having.

The rest of the stack

Kernel 6.2 brings new drivers with it, which is usually the practical reason to take an interim release: newer hardware that the previous LTS does not see.

Which release should you actually run

Take 23.04 if you have hardware new enough to need kernel 6.2’s drivers, or you want GNOME 44 now, and you are comfortable upgrading again in nine months.

Stay on the LTS if the machine does work you depend on. Five years of support against nine is not a close call for a system you would rather not think about.

Interim releases are where Canonical tries things — the Flutter installer being exactly that. That is useful, and it is also the reason they are not what you put on a machine that needs to keep working.