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Canonical is resuming work on their modern, immutable, secure desktop: Ubuntu Core Desktop.

Work based on a previous demo has already been rebased on core26, with three clearly defined initial use cases over the coming months. The project aims to become the default for a future release of Ubuntu.

The phrase “if it hurts, do it more often” has bee applied variously to software teams and processes in the last fifteen years, and is a means to improve team processes and efficiency, but must be wielded carefully!

This post covers my application of, and experience with this idea during my time leading Ubuntu Engineering and Charm Engineering at Canonical.

Development of the upki project, which aims to bring browser-grade cryptography primitives to low-level Linux system utilities, continues at pace.

As of now, users of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and the Ubuntu 26.10 development branch can try out the upki client in a preview provided through a PPA.

I recently attended Ubuntu Summit 26.04, a twice-yearly showcase for innovative and ambitious work across Ubuntu, open source, and the wider technology ecosystem.

This post covers some personal highlights, from the launch of Canonical Workshop to talks on Puter, bootc, Gleam, Collabora Office, Arm Performix, and upki.

AI tools are becoming ubiquitous. Adoption across the tech industry has been mixed, both in terms of which projects are embracing “AI” technologies, and in how companies are structuring their adoption

This post details how AI will play a part in both Canonical and Ubuntu’s future, my framework for classifying AI features in the OS, and how Canonical is currently approaching adoption internally.

Ubuntu is transitioning to the Rust-based ntpd-rs as its default time synchronization utility, replacing chrony, linuxptp, and gpsd to deliver a unified, memory-safe solution for NTP, NTS, and PTP.

This move, in partnership with the Trifecta Tech Foundation, strengthens Ubuntu’s resilience goals, with full adoption planned across the Ubuntu 26.10 and 27.04 releases.

I built a self-hosted coffee logging platform with Rust, Axum, SQLite and Datastar. The project was my most complex agentic coding effort to date, with Claude Code acting as my long‑lived pair‑programmer for almost all of the implementation.

This post covers the motivation, design decisions, and what I learned about building non-trivial software with AI assistance, as well as some patterns I’ve adopted for agentic coding.

This post provides an update on the Canonical-supported upki project, which brings browser-grade Public Key Infrastructure to Linux through the efficient CRLite data format, with the core revocation engine now functional and available to test.

Beyond current progress, this post explores broader integration, performance, and future capabilities like Certificate Transparency enforcement and Merkle Tree Certificates.

AI-assisted tooling is becoming more and more common in the workflows of engineers at all experience levels. As I see it, our challenge is one of consideration, enablement and constraint.

We must enable those who opt-in to safely and responsibly harness the power of these tools, while respecting those who do not wish to have their platform defined or overwhelmed by this class of software.

I recently had the privilege of attending the Ubuntu Summit 25.10 - an event hosted by Canonical to celebrate the release of Ubuntu 25.10, and provide a platform for open source projects from around the globe to showcase their work.

This post includes some personal highlights and a brief summary of some of the talks.

In February this year, I posted a manifesto to to modernise the design, build and release of Ubuntu.

This week, we released Ubuntu 25.10 Questing Quokka, which was the first full engineering cycle under this new manifesto, This post is a look back at the progress made since that original post.

Immutable Linux distributions are gaining popularity due to their resilience and security, with mainstream operating systems adopting similar principles.

This post explores how different Linux distributions achieve immutability, the trade-offs, and why you should give it a try!