Martin Wimpress, Director of Desktop Development at Canonical, reported the development of a new installer for Ubuntu, which they plan to offer users for testing in the fall release of Ubuntu Desktop 21.10 and may be used by default in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The old Ubiquity installer will be kept in the repository and will remain available for use in Ubuntu editions and derivative distributions.
The Ubiquity installer was developed in 2006 and has not been developed for the past few years. In the server edition of Ubuntu, starting with the 18.04 release, a new installer Subiquity is shipped, which is an add-on over the low-level installer curtin , responsible for the final partitioning of the disc, download packages and install the system based on the given configuration.
The presence of two different installers complicates maintenance and creates confusion for users, so it was decided to unify development and prepare a new installer instead of the outdated Ubiquity, built on a common basis with Subiquity and using the same installation process for server and desktop systems. Creating a new installer will also bring the best experience of existing installation systems and implement functionality based on wishes of various user categories.
Currently a working prototype of the new installer is available , prepared by the Canonical Design Team and the Ubuntu Desktop Team.
The new installer is a curtin add-on that uses the Flutter framework for the user interface to create universal applications that run on different platforms. The installer shell code is written in Dart (for comparison, Ubiquity and Subiquity are written in Python). The installer is designed with the modern style of the Ubuntu desktop in mind, and is designed to provide a consistent installation process across the entire Ubuntu product line.
