What We Do
Ubuntu Portal is an independent publication dedicated to practical Ubuntu and Linux documentation. We cover the full stack of daily Linux life — from command-line fundamentals and filesystem management to hardware compatibility and release tracking — with tested, reproducible instructions that respect your time.
Every piece of content on this site is written by people who actually run Ubuntu on their daily machines. That sounds like it should be obvious for a Linux publication, but you would be surprised how many tutorial sites are assembled by writers who have never formatted a partition or debugged a kernel panic at 2 a.m. We have. More than once.
Editorial Approach
Our editorial philosophy is straightforward: if we haven’t tested it, we don’t publish it.
That means commands are run against real installations — not containers spun up for a screenshot and torn down five minutes later. When we document a process like configuring Nvidia Optimus switching or recovering a broken fstab entry, we do it on hardware that we depend on for actual work. The result is documentation that accounts for the rough edges, the gotchas, and the “what do I do when this doesn’t work” scenarios that polished vendor docs tend to skip.
We prioritize:
- Accuracy over speed. We would rather delay a guide by a week than publish something half-verified. When Ubuntu ships a new LTS point release, we wait until we have run upgrades on multiple machines before writing up the process.
- Concrete details over abstraction. File paths, exact command flags, expected output — these matter more than theory paragraphs. If a configuration lives in
/etc/default/grub, we say so. If a package was renamed between releases, we note both names. - Honest caveats. Not every solution works on every hardware combination. We flag known issues, kernel version dependencies, and driver quirks rather than pretending a one-liner fixes everything.
What You Will Find Here
Ubuntu Portal is organized into focused sections, each serving a different need:
Documentation
Core reference material covering essential Ubuntu administration. This is where you will find our CLI basics guide — covering shell fundamentals, package management with apt, and common system administration commands — along with our filesystem and mounts reference that walks through everything from fstab syntax to recovery procedures for corrupted mount points.
Guides
Longer, task-oriented walkthroughs for specific goals. Think “set up a development environment on Ubuntu 24.04” or “migrate your home directory to a separate partition without reinstalling.” These are the articles we wished existed when we were solving these problems ourselves.
Hardware
Real-world hardware compatibility notes and driver configuration. Our Nvidia Optimus page is a good example — it covers the current state of GPU switching on laptops, including PRIME profiles, power management, and the quirks that differ between desktop environments. Hardware content is updated as new kernel versions change driver behaviour.
Releases
Ubuntu release tracking — from initial announcements through point releases and end-of-life dates. We maintain a timeline covering current LTS and interim releases, with notes on upgrade paths and known issues that surface post-release.
Tools
Coverage of terminal emulators, system utilities, and productivity software that runs well on Ubuntu. We focus on tools we actually use rather than trying to catalogue every option in the repository.
Our Background
The team behind Ubuntu Portal has collectively spent well over a decade working with Debian-based systems in environments ranging from personal workstations to small-fleet server deployments. We are not a large media company — this is a focused publication maintained by practitioners who care about getting the details right.
Our contributors have experience across system administration, desktop Linux configuration, embedded systems, and developer tooling. That breadth shows up in the content: we understand that the person reading a guide on fixing PulseAudio routing might also need help configuring a systemd service the same afternoon.
What We Are Not
A few things worth clarifying:
- We are not affiliated with Canonical. Ubuntu is a trademark of Canonical Ltd. We are an independent publication — we do not speak for Canonical, and our recommendations are our own.
- We are not a news site. You will not find daily headlines here. We focus on reference material and guides that remain useful for months or years, updated as the underlying software changes.
- We are not a forum. While we welcome corrections and suggestions through our contact page, we do not host user discussions. There are excellent community forums already serving that role.
Staying Current
Linux distributions move fast, and documentation that was accurate six months ago can become misleading after a kernel bump or a package reorganization. We treat content maintenance as an ongoing responsibility — not something that happens once at publication time.
Our changelog tracks substantive updates across the site. When apt changes its default behaviour, when a new LTS point release ships, when Nvidia updates their driver branch — those changes get reflected in the relevant pages, and the changelog records what was updated and when.
If you spot something that has fallen out of date, we genuinely want to hear about it. Reach out through our contact page and we will get it sorted.