With our castor Castor now out for all to enjoy, and the Twitterverse delighted with the new minimal desktop and smooth snap integration, it’s time to turn our attention to the road ahead to 20.04 LTS, and I’m delighted to say that we’ll kick off that journey with the Cosmic Cuttlefish, soon to be known as Ubuntu 18.10.

Each of us has our own ideas of how the free stack will evolve in the next two years. And the great thing about Ubuntu is that it doesn’t reflect just one set of priorities, it’s an aggregation of all the things our community cares about. Nevertheless I thought I’d take the opportunity early in this LTS cycle to talk a little about the thing I’m starting to care more about than any one feature, and that’s security.

If I had one big thing that I could feel great about doing, systematically, for everyone who uses Ubuntu, it would be improving their confidence in the security of their systems and their data. It’s one of the very few truly unifying themes that crosses every use case.

It’s extraordinary how diverse the uses are to which the world puts Ubuntu these days, from the heart of the mainframe operation in a major financial firm, to the raspberry pi duck-taped to the back of a prototype something in the middle of nowhere, from desktops to clouds to connected things, we are the platform for ambitions great and small. We are stewards of a shared platform, and one of the ways we respond to that diversity is by opening up to let people push forward their ideas, making sure only that they are excellent to each other in the pushing.

But security is the one thing that every community wants – and it’s something that, on reflection, we can raise the bar even higher on.

So without further ado: thank you to everyone who helped bring about Bionic, and may you all enjoy working towards your own goals both in and out of Ubuntu in the next two years.