35 Years of Linux Principles. Ubuntu Just Threw Them Away in One Snap.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS just shipped the fastest developer setup Linux has ever seen. It is hidden in a roadmap Canonical published one day before public release.
One Snap Store. One company.
The fastest developer setup Linux has ever shipped runs on a private server you cannot copy, and is signed by a company you cannot work around. That is the Snap Devpacks deal.
On April 22, 2026, the day before Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "Resolute Raccoon" was added to the mirrors, Canonical published a blog post titled "From Jammy to Resolute: how Ubuntu's toolchains have evolved." Inside that post sat a Snap Devpacks roadmap that quietly changed what Ubuntu means as a developer machine. Most of the Linux community missed it. The post went up on Wednesday, while everyone was waiting for the Long-Term Support (LTS) release the next day.
devpack-for-spring is live. devpack-for-go is live. The .NET snaps are live. Rust, C/C++, and Python are next. There are also hints about Conda packages and game engines. Every one of them ships through one Snap Store you cannot copy. One infrastructure you cannot host yourself. One company that signs every package.
I have been installing Java toolchains on Linux laptops since 2004. I have pulled Java Development Kits (JDKs) from Sun, Oracle, OpenJDK mirrors, SDKMAN, asdf, and mise. I ran sudo snap install devpack-for-spring --classic, and built a Spring Boot project from scratch.
It works... The setup is faster than anything Linux has ever shipped.