UBUNTU SUMMIT Canonical is still experimenting with the format of the Ubuntu Summit series of free conferences, and its most recent instance, the 26. 04 edition, was a primarily online event. There was a small in-person invited audience, which by our informal estimate was about half the size of the one at last October's edition.
The event opened with a keynote from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, and his opening sentence set the tone for much of what would follow: The agentic revolution will touch every aspect of human endeavor. We take that to mean the use of LLM "agents" to develop software, translate between human languages and from speech to text, and so on. For all that this vulture might personally dispute just how revolutionary this is, there were some 21 full-length talks over the two days of the summit, and about half of them were about AI, or at least touched upon the subject.
Shuttleworth's keynote also contained the biggest Canonical product announcement of the event: the new Workshop sandboxed LLM development environments (at the 20-minute mark in the video above). Workshop uses Canonical's LXD "containervisor" and snap packaging to make it easy to install and run LLM agents, while keeping them isolated in sandboxes so that they can only access specific limited resources in that user's home directory.
For instance, they can access the machine's GPUs and nominated local files, while being walled off from personal data such as stored credentials. As Shuttleworth put it: You can run random code, from the internet, on your laptop, without handing it root. Canonical also announced Workshop online the same day, with a collection of documentation already available, including a tutorial.
Workshop is an open source project with the source code on GitHub. Later that day, engineering manager Dmitry Lyfar gave a talk on the new tool, titled Introducing Workshop. Shuttleworth's keynote was followed by another by VP of engineering Jon Seager.
As we reported last month in our article on AI integration into Ubuntu and Fedora, Seager recently published a blog post about the company's AI intentions. In his keynote, Seager said that this post had been "SEO'd to death," but he too devoted a substantial part of his talk to AI, saying: Ubuntu can't be in the conversation about AI and open source unless it has a position and a stake.
Seager also spelled out some of what this will mean, from small feature improvements such as improving auto-focus in webcams and making power management more intelligent, to more significant features. He called out accessibility as a key area for investment and improvement. He said that "existing Linux screen readers suck" – harsh, but not entirely unfair – and that there is "so much room for improvement" in that area.
He continued that the plan is "to enable speech-to-text everywhere in the desktop," but said "AI is transformative for people with disabilities" and that the company soon hopes to preview the "first AI-powered context-aware desktop features." In case, this sounds niche or unimportant, it really isn't. Speech-to-text is a vital tool for people with physical impairments that make typing difficult.
This vulture has written at length about the importance of keyboard user interface design, as well as about how few Linux desktops fully and correctly implement it, leaving Apple with a significant edge in this area. As it happens, this author is a keyboard-intensive user with relatively poor eyesight, so this matters to us. Register accessibility columnist Colin Hughes has written about the importance of speech-to-text UI.
For now, Linux's usability in this area is much poorer, and as Wayland displaces X11 from the big-name desktops, it's about to get a lot worse, as the recent blog post from "nocoffei" describes: My Accessibility Stack and the future on Wayland. "nocoffei" links to the same series of blog posts by TapType developer Aaron Hewitt that we did back in March, under the collective title "I Want to Love Linux.
It Doesn't Love Me Back." We recommend them again: Built for Control, But Not for People: Linux is already broken before you even start The Audio Stack Is a Crime Scene: You can't hear anything – and it's not your fault Interlude – A Thank You, Where It's Due: This is what it looks like when people care In part 4, he takes a surprising new direction: Wayland Is Growing Up, And Now We Don't Have a Choice: The future is Wayland.
Let's make sure we're invited. In that, he reports on significant strides in keyboard-driven accessibility for blind users with GNOME on Wayland – but as nocoffei's post spells out, that is no help to those who can see fine but can't type. If the integration of AI into Ubuntu can address this or improve on the current situation, that will go further toward ameliorating this vulture's deep skepticism about the viability of LLMs than anything else.
Bootnotes Canonical invited The Register to attend the Summit in person, and paid for our travel and accommodation during the event. Indeed, if you look closely at the 30-second mark of the highlight reel – it's only 50 seconds long, so it's not too arduous – you can see The Reg FOSS desk's hands typing away industriously into Logseq. Back in April 2023, severe injuries from a road traffic accident very nearly cost the author one of those hands, which is part of the reason for his interest in accessibility tools – as well as the reason for the MacBook Air visible in that video, into which his articles were dictated for the next few months.
On the subject of AI integration into desktop distros, it's interesting to note that since we wrote about AI tooling in Fedora a month ago, there has been considerable pushback from the user community, and two committee members have changed their votes to oppose it.
Originally published at theregister.com
