Review: Ubuntu Core 24
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
When I first started looking at Canonical's immutable branch of Ubuntu, I was expecting to find something like Fedora Silverblue or openSUSE's MicroOS/Micro Leap/Aeon. Fedora's and openSUSE's atomic flavours are pretty close to the more mainstream, writable versions of their respective distributions. In other words, if you're running openSUSE's MicroOS, it's pretty close to the experience you'd get running openSUSE's more commonly used Leap edition. Running Fedora Silverblue looks and feels a lot like Fedora Workstation, at least until we look under the hood. Ubuntu isn't like that, running Core is a completely different experience from Ubuntu's Desktop and Server editions.
It's not a welcome change. Setting up Ubuntu Core is a test of patience. It doesn't have a system installer, requiring we bootstrap it from another distribution; it doesn't have any on-screen instructions to help users navigate the console-based environment; Core spews systemd status messages over the screen while we are trying to set it up; it requires an on-line account; and it demands we set up authentication using third-party servers rather than allowing us to use local credentials. This last point, relying on Canonical's servers, is especially annoying as it means it's impossible to set up Core in an off-line environment, during a local network outage, or when Canonical's servers go off-line. This is unusually limiting for a Linux distribution.
I'd understand this approach of relying on Ubuntu SSO for authentication if it offered any benefit, but as far as I can tell, it does not. Linking Core to an Ubuntu SSO account doesn't make administration easier, make it faster to deploy machines, or offer any tools for managing multiple deployments. It seems to be over-engineering for the sake of it with no perk for the user.