Communication can always be improved, it is really hard to reach the
full community and make everyone aware of what is going on and why. The
plan originally was to have desktop components as part of 24.04 but
things have just are taken way, way, longer than was planned for.

The feature it self was available for beta testing during the 22.10
cycle via ppa kernel, disabled by default but in the 23.04 release. Had
revisions and improvements were added for the 23.10 release but it was
still left disabled by default. For 23.10 there were release notes and
it was blogged about (both of the links above were for 23.10, there were
some additional blogs/articles as well), before being finally enabled by
default in 24.04 (further release notes and blogging, eg).

https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-desktop-24-04-noble-numbat-deep-dive
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-04-lts-noble-numbat-release-notes/39890#p-99950-security-improvements
https://ubuntu.com/blog/whats-new-in-security-for-ubuntu-24-04-lts


The desktop side in particular has been slow and problematic, and it really 
should have been part of the 24.04 release. That didn't happen for several 
reasons, but the decision was made to move forward with the restriction because 
unprivileged user namespaces were a core piece of several high priority 
exploits every year. Admittedly they are not so critical on the desktop, but 
very much so for cloud providers using containers.

Sadly the desktop components are still not enabled by default for
several reasons. In particular the desktop team wants several
improvements to the whole notification/prompt side of things before it
can land as a default part of the desktop. This requires both design
review, and desktop team time which has been lacking, they have had
other priorities like FDE (full disk encryption) eating their time. The
new schedule is looking like probably landing the newer GUI components
in 26.10 (they didn't make 25.10, and with 26.04 being an LTS ...)

This does give the GUI components more time to improve and mature. The
prompt will be able to move from the post facto that it is today, to a
true permission prompt (ie. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-
desktop-s-24-10-dev-cycle-part-5-introducing-permissions-prompting/47963
except for regular desktop applications not just snaps). There should
also be a desktop component (whether in gnome settings or the security
center) to allow enabling, disabling, and changing the prompted
permissions on a per application basis, and by then we might also be
able to tie it into cryptographic hashes for applications, so that known
binaries/hashes for different upstreams can automatically be given
permissions, reducing the prompt to only custom/unknown applications.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2136883

Title:
  apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns breaks some Electron, Chromium,
  and QtWebEngine applications

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