Launchpad, the home of Ubuntu development, has finally received some design attention.
Canonical last updated the site’s homepage back in 2024, but many of the pages that the distro’s developers actually use or reference on a regular basis have remained untouched for the best part of a decade.
Now that’s starting to change.
Canonical UX designer Enzo Deng has announced that the company has “begun […] a complete redesign of the series page” for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, describing it as the start of “the journey of modernizing the Launchpad user experience” (sic).
Save for a line on how the company has heard that Launchpad’s interface has “become a source of friction” for contributors, there’s little substantive detail on what’s changed or why. It would’ve been nice to hear the tangible problems solved by the revamp.
Instead, we get a set of glib value statements talking about how “This is more than a visual refresh—it is a commitment to making your work more efficient”, and that “managing complex tasks should be as intuitive as the operating system itself, not a legacy challenge.”
Thankfully the visuals speak for themselves. The series pages benefit from greater information density and display, with an arrangement that puts key info on bugs, milestones and package uploads on show.
But unless you’re a developer or packager working on the distro (or a blogger tracking it, heh) then these changes make no real difference to you: you’ll continue to never see them.
One concrete claim worth holding onto is that Deng says the series page revamp is but “the first milestone in a broader initiative to revamp the entire Launchpad web app” – though Canonical’s engineering team said something similar in 2024.
Head to launchpad.net/ubuntu/resolute to see the change. While Deng says the effort start with 26.04, the series pages for all Ubuntu releases have been updated to adopt the new designs – I chose noble for my screenshots.
Launchpad has never been the cornerstone for most open source projects and code hosting, mainly owing to Canonical pushing a Bazaar backend over Git, a decision it reversed course on last year.