Ubuntu has taken another step that, honestly, leaves me scratching my head. While most distributions try to offer as many convenient GUI tools as possible to help users manage every part of their system, Ubuntu… apparently sees things a bit differently.
I say this because Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (scheduled for release on April, 23) will no longer ship the long-standing “Software & Updates” graphical tool by default on fresh desktop installs, following a change proposed in Launchpad as bug 2140527.
The adjustment replaces the software-properties-gtk package in the desktop seed with software-properties-common, effectively removing the visible GUI while keeping the underlying repository management tools in place.
Hm. Did you see an option for “non-free firmware”? It should be included as an option since Debian major version 11.
It’s an Intel wifi chip. It shouldn’t need non-free firmware!
You’re right about that. I wonder how it can be fixed so that other people don’t hit the same issue.
The other day, the extent of my investigation was to find this forum thread, dismiss it as “kernel too old” (even though the thread was from 2023, LOL), and move on to Kubuntu. Looking more carefully, it seems like my Debian 13.3.0 image (debian-live-13.3.0-amd64-kde.iso) should’ve shipped with a kernel new enough to include it (6.12, compared to “6.1 or 6.2” which is when the Intel employee in the forum thread said it was added), so now I’m not so sure what the real problem was.
It also just occurred to me that I should’ve jumped up to Debian Testing before resorting to Ubuntu (I wasn’t thinking too hard about it and just used the same flash drive as I had recently used to install it on my parents’ PC, which I really did want to be on Debian Stable). Oh well.
Regardless though, I think the main fix is “ship a newer kernel in the next version of the distro” and it’ll take care of itself over time.
I wonder if Forky would have worked.