Red Hat gives Ubuntu a bootc up the backside at Canonical shindig
Red Hat gives Ubuntu a bootc up the backside at Canonical shindig
Publish Date: 2026-06-15 11:54:00
Source Domain: www.theregister.com
UBUNTU SUMMIT At a Canonical event, we didn’t expect a presentation on using Red Hat’s container management tools, but if this is something you might need, it does sound useful.
At Ubuntu Summit 26.04, Red Hat Principal Software Engineer Joseph Marrero Corchado presented a talk called Bootc: Use your container knowledge and infrastructure to build and deploy your Ubuntu hosts. Although Ubuntu is very strong in the desktop Linux space, in large corporate server environments, Ubuntu is just another distro among many. This can be a good thing: it is just another Linux distro, and that means that it’s perfectly possible to deploy and manage it using existing FOSS tooling.
Marrero introduced himself by saying that he works at Red Hat, but personally runs Ubuntu – and has been doing so for long enough that he has some original media from Canonical’s ShipIt program, which the company discontinued in 2011.
While we were surpised to see a Red Hat engineer presenting a talk at the summit, it’s not unprecedented. System76’s Pop!_OS distro is based on Ubuntu, but it overlaps with other distros as well. It has its own desktop and eschews Snap for Flatpak – and yet, at the previous Summit, System76 boss Carl Richell presented a talk about it. The year before, the Academy Software Foundation’s talk started by telling us that Rocky Linux strongly dominated the SFX industry.
Our plan here isn’t to recap the entire talk. It’s up on YouTube now, and if this is the sort of thing that sounds interesting, it’s probably a good use of 42 minutes of your time.
bootc grows up
We’ve mentioned the bootc toolchain a few times on The Register. Back in April 2024, we reported that Fedora 40’s immutable editions were being rebuilt as bootable containers. Two years and four more Fedora releases later, the toolchain is getting more mature, as we covered in April with Fedora 44, and we linked to Quentin Joly’s explainer, Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment, which…
