Lubuntu 24.04 LTS to Include Snap Installation Monitor for a Smoother Experience

This feature is designed for users of low-end hardware to enjoy a smoother onboarding experience when installing Lubuntu with Snaps.
Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Lubuntu 24.04 LTS Snap

Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley tells me that the upcoming Lubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) release will include a new tool he wrote to monitor the installation of Snap packages and inform the user about it during the first boot.

Lubuntu is and will always be known as the lightest official Ubuntu flavor on the market, and, with the upcoming Noble Numbat series, the Lubuntu devs want users to enjoy a smoother experience with and without Snaps. I’m saying without because Lubuntu is the only official Ubuntu flavor (for now) to let you install a Snap-free system using the Minimal installation option in the Calamares installer.

But, for those of you who prefer to install Lubuntu using the Normal or Full installation options, or if you choose to install additional third-party packages offered during the installation (e.g. Thunderbird, Krita, Virtual Machine Manager, Element, or Firmware Updater), you’ll automatically end up with apps that are only available (to Ubuntu and official flavors) in the Snap sandboxed format.

And, since you’ll probably want to install Lubuntu on low-end hardware, with Lubuntu 24.04 LTS you’ll have a smoother onboarding experience thanks to the new Snap installation monitor that developer Simon Quigley wrote for the upcoming release, if, for example, you try to use Firefox right after boot, but it is not fully installed yet.

The new Snap installation monitor (lubuntu-snap-installation-monitor) consists of two snap-based utilities, namely snap-seed-glue, a command-line tool that allows for preseeding snaps, and simple-snap-preseed-dialog, a tool that visually informs the user during the first boot that background processes are still running and when the process is completed so that they can start using Snap apps.

“On first boot, whether it’s the live ISO or your freshly installed system, Snaps have an initial setup process in which the downloaded Snaps are extracted, mounted, and marked as installed. This is called the preseed process, and leaves many users with lower-end hardware confused when they cannot launch their snapped application right away after first boot,” explains Simon Quigley.

Simon Quigley tells me that Lubuntu will be the only official flavor to feature these new Snap installation monitor utilities for the Noble Numbat cycle. Also, another thing to mention is that besides the first boot, users should not notice the new Snap installation monitor feature during their entire Lubuntu desktop experience.

Apart from this Snap installation monitor thingy, Lubuntu 24.04 LTS will also come with an updated Calamares installer with new options to improve the Lubuntu installation experience, an optional Wayland session alongside the default X11 one, and a new “First Boot” screen where you can select a Wi-Fi network and set the default system language before trying or installing Lubuntu.

Last updated 2 weeks ago

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