The first point release in the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS series will now arrive on August 11, a week later than originally planned.
Canonical’s Lukasz Zemczak announced the new on the Ubuntu developer mailing list earlier, noting that an “unexpected issue” affecting OEM installs and Snaps was discovered late in testing. Given the relative severity of the issue with regards to the Ubuntu desktop experience (see below for details) the scheduled release has been punted/postponed/put-off by a week.
So what’s literally the issue here?
“Th[e] bug causes preinstalled snaps not to work on the final target system after the “OEM install” option is selected during installation (i.e. after the end-user setup is performed). This behavior would seriously impact the experience of any users whose login was created after an OEM install,” Zemczak writes.
No working Snaps after install — though some will be keen to describe that as a feature, not a flaw 😜 — is clearly a significant issue given that the distro’s default browser is packaged as one.
Upgrade notifications for users on 20.04 are also being delayed. Canonical says these will roll out once the corrected image for 22.04.1 is made available to download on August 11.
I will stress that the reported issue does not affect existing Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installs or install media. If you have a 22.04 .ISO laying around and you want to install from it you won’t be affected by the issue (though chances are you wouldn’t be installing Ubuntu in OEM mode anyway, but that’s by-the-by 💁🏻♂️).
Minor bump, in all — but I wanted to pass on the news so you’re not scratching your head later today wondering where it went…