Ubuntu 22.10 and above may get Gnome Console as a replacement for Terminal

The upcoming version of Ubuntu may get a different terminal application. Developers suggest replacing Gnome Terminal with the more minimalistic Gnome Console. An important hurdle has recently been overcome for this.

The developers did the proposal already in May. They then proposed to follow the Gnome 42 upstream as the default terminal application. It uses Console instead of Terminal as default, but that was not possible for some time. There was a bug in Ubuntu 22.10 that prevented Console from opening new tabs in a hot folder. That bug has now been patched. This seems to increase the possibility that Terminal will be replaced by Console in 22.10 and future versions of the distribution.

Console has a more minimalist UI than Terminal. Most notably, the background is transparent, but there is no way to adjust the transparency level. Another possible drawback is that there is a 10,000 row scroll limit in the program, but users can adjust that. The main advantage of Console, according to the developers, is that it warns commands that have been running for a long time and that the colors change when users use sudo or establish an ssh connection.

Gnome Console is already the default in Gnome 42, but Ubuntu distros still use Terminal. Users can of course install Console manually and enable it as default, but that is not the default for the time being.