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"Ubuntu Certified" and Canonical Breaking Things in Ubuntu for No Good Reason
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OMG Ubuntu ☛ Ubuntu 26.10 will add Ubuntu Certified checking to Settings
Wondering if your laptop or desktop PC is Ubuntu Certified? Ubuntu 26.10 is adding a new way to check from the Settings app. A new row in Settings > System > About reads “check if this computer is Ubuntu Certified”. Clicking it opens a new page that will read the local/cached status from the com.ubuntu.hwctl service (the Canonical hardware API introduced in 2025). Ubuntu’s has had a command-line way to check certification for a while, using hwlib. In 26.10 (Stonking Stingray), you’ll be able to check it via Settings rather than through terminal command.
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University of Toronto ☛ Ubuntu 26.04 has broken shutdown announcements and wall doesn't work
Surprisingly, these turn out to be two separate issues. The wall issue is because starting in Debian 13 ('Trixie') and Ubuntu 25.10, the Debian and Ubuntu systemd is built without support for /var/run/utmp (aka /run/utmp), the traditional file recording who is logged in where; wall (which comes from the 'bsdutils' package) only looks in the utmp file. If there's no utmp file, wall is never going to do anything. If you need a wall equivalent, you'll need to write a script that gets the list of active user sessions with ptys and writes a message to them itself.