Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Aims To Enhance The Certified OEM Experience From Its Installer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Aims To Enhance The Certified OEM Experience From Its Installer

Booting the generic Ubuntu 20.04 LTS install media on a "Certified OEM" Ubuntu device could yield a different experience compared to running Ubuntu on a system not certified by Canonical...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-20.04-Certified-OEM-Exp

[Guest]

Sounds neat, but hopefully won't lead to bloatware being offered by said OEMs with certified computers.

[ssokolow]

Sounds neat, but hopefully won't lead to bloatware being offered by said OEMs with certified computers.

The impression I get is that it's purely about Canonical allowing the installer to retrieve updated drivers, so the only way bloatware *could* be offered is if companies start acting malware-y by following this pattern:

• The installer recognizes the model ID in the SMBIOS and enables a third-party repo, then selects the pre-approved extra drivers
• In the interim since the installer image was mastered, the company altered their repo to make the drivers list the bloatware as dependencies.

Since that would only work until Canonical masters a new image and could result in Canonical kicking them out of the program, I don't think companies will do that lightly.

(i.e. It's not about allowing companies to specify arbitrary deployment images. It's about allowing the LTS installer to choose newer versions of certain packages if it recognizes the device it's running on as having initially come with such a hybrid-versioned setup.)

[DL9220]

Sounds strangely as if Canonical is going the Micro$oft-route. If you want updates, you'll have to buy this or that hardware. HW-manufacturers can "order" licenses to get in the market for top-level certified HW.

Cheers

[ssokolow]

Sounds strangely as if Canonical is going the Micro$oft-route. If you want updates, you'll have to buy this or that hardware. HW-manufacturers can "order" licenses to get in the market for top-level certified HW.

Cheers

No, it sounds like "If you buy this or that hardware, the manufacturer may have informed Canonical that the LTS installer needs to special-case it to choose a newer LTS kernel to avoid a broken/buggy install."

[Danny3]

Now it finally makes sense why the fuck Canonical decides to stick to an old kernel for the new Ubuntu LTS!

I've should've realized sooner that with canonical it's always the same scheme, they want money and they will do everything for that
In the past they got money from Amazon, Microsoft to shoot themselves in the foot to include spyware or break stuff and now it's from OEMs.

This reminds me of the worst airport I have ever seen (Bergamo, Italy) where I searched for 2 hours to find a power socket to charge my phone only to discover that all the power sockets have been moved closer to the ceiling (2.5 meters high).
It seems that someone have put a phone charging machine that requires you to pay a few Euros for it.
And since nobody wants to pay for a service that should be actually free of charge or cost just a few cents not Euros, I bet they got a deal with the airport administrators to do this crap of breaking the normal charging options by moving the power sockets out of reach.

It seems Canonical is doing the same crap with sticking to an old version of the kernel to force users to pay one way or another for wonderful opportunity of using a current up to date kernel.
I'm sorry to say this, but every new thing I hear about what Canonical is doing is just disgusting!

[ssokolow]

Now it finally makes sense why the fuck Canonical decides to stick to an old kernel for the new Ubuntu LTS!

I've should've realized sooner that with canonical it's always the same scheme, they want money and they will do everything for that
In the past they got money from Amazon, Microsoft to shoot themselves in the foot to include spyware or break stuff and now it's from OEMs.

This reminds me of the worst airport I have ever seen (Bergamo, Italy) where I searched for 2 hours to find a power socket to charge my phone only to discover that all the power sockets have been moved closer to the ceiling (2.5 meters high).
It seems that someone have put a phone charging machine that requires you to pay a few Euros for it.
And since nobody wants to pay for a service that should be actually free of charge or cost just a few cents not Euros, I bet they got a deal with the airport administrators to do this crap of breaking the normal charging options by moving the power sockets out of reach.

It seems Canonical is doing the same crap with sticking to an old version of the kernel to force users to pay one way or another for wonderful opportunity of using a current up to date kernel.
I'm sorry to say this, but every new thing I hear about what Canonical is doing is just disgusting!

No, Canonical is and always has been offering a less stale version of what Debian Stable offers. That's the whole point of an LTS release. So corporate IT departments can stay on the versions of programs that they've already tested and receive security updates without fear that an update will be pushed out which might start causing crashes or other expensive regressions in something they depend on for their revenue.

If you want more up-to-date stuff, take the offer to upgrade to a newer Ubuntu rather than staying on the version that's guaranteed to get security updates for 5 years beyond its release date, despite new versions coming out every six months.

[Danny3]

No, Canonical is and always has been offering a less stale version of what Debian Stable offers. That's the whole point of an LTS release. So corporate IT departments can stay on the versions of programs that they've already tested and receive security updates without fear that an update will be pushed out which might start causing crashes or other expensive regressions in something they depend on for their revenue.

If you want more up-to-date stuff, take the offer to upgrade to a newer Ubuntu rather than staying on the version that's guaranteed to get security updates for 5 years beyond its release date, despite new versions coming out every six months.

Yes, true, but it was not always this stale. Now they are intentinally using an old version to make money and this is bad.
I wish they would offer a paid version of the OS like Microsoft with everything updated instead of doing this crap.

[ssokolow]

Yes, true, but it was not always this stale. Now they are intentinally using an old version to make money and this is bad.
I wish they would offer a paid version of the OS like Microsoft with everything updated instead of doing this crap.

You don't seem to grasp that this is the LTS release, not the semi-annual releases.

The whole point of an LTS release is to advantage stability over freshness by delivering as little as possible aside from security backports. You're saying "Yes, but it was not always this stable. Now they are intentionally doing a better job of giving enterprise users what they expect. I wish they would offer a paid version of the OS like Microsoft which falsely claims to be an LTS when it's actually forcing users to upgrade to whatever the newest free Ubuntu release is instead of doing this release."

The point of the certified OEM offerings is so that, if someone installs a slightly too old LTS release to get proper driver support from a given model of device, the installer can recognize that and automatically bump the kernel and any drivers delivered as supporting packages up to a hardware enablement update that does work properly with it.

Again, Ubuntu has three tracks a user can go on:

1. Update every six months, as new Ubuntu releases come out.
2. Install an LTS release and update every two years, as new LTS releases come out.
3. Install an LTS release and update every 4-5 years, taking full advantage of the support windows for LTS releases.

It's not Ubuntu's job to force people onto option 1 when they chose options 2 or 3.

[boxie]

Now it finally makes sense why the fuck Canonical decides to stick to an old kernel for the new Ubuntu LTS!

because the 5.4 Kernel is an LTS release, while 5.5 and 5.6 are not - thus reducing their maintenance burden?