An Ubuntu tool that outgrew Ubuntu
Multipass was built on a narrow, useful promise: one command, one Ubuntu virtual machine, no hypervisor archaeology. You type `multipass launch`, wait a few seconds, and you have a cloud-style Ubuntu box on your laptop with cloud-init already finished. For years that promise carried a quiet asterisk — the image catalog was Ubuntu all the way down.
That asterisk is now gone. As heise online reports, Debian and Fedora have joined the image catalog.
Why a second distro matters more than it sounds
Most "just use a VM" advice assumes the distribution doesn't matter. It does, at precisely the moments people reach for a VM in the first place:
- Packaging. Building a `.deb` on Ubuntu tells you very little about whether your software works on Debian stable, where library versions lag by design. - The RPM world. Fedora is where a lot of upstream Linux work lands first. Testing there catches problems before they reach the RHEL-derived systems your customers actually run. - Reproducing the bug report. "Fails on Debian 12" is a report you can now answer locally, instead of in a container that emulates the wrong init system. - CI parity. If CI runs on a Fedora image, a local Fedora VM is a far shorter feedback loop than pushing a commit and waiting.
Containers already do much of this, and faster. But containers share your kernel, and a meaningful class of problems — boot behaviour, systemd units, kernel modules, secure boot, network stack quirks — only appears on a real kernel. That is the gap Multipass fills, and it now fills it for three distro families.
The catch is maintenance, not technology
Launching a Debian cloud image was never technically hard; `multipass` could already boot arbitrary images by URL. The work is in the catalog: curating images, rebuilding them when the distro publishes a point release, keeping the metadata honest, and deciding what "supported" means when the distro's release cadence differs from Ubuntu's.
That is a commitment measured in years, not a launch-day feature. Canonical is now on the hook for images it does not control — and the interesting question is how often they get refreshed, and whether the Debian and Fedora entries ever gain the first-class aliases that Ubuntu releases enjoy.
What to do with it today
If you already use Multipass, the practical change is that your local test matrix can now include the distro your production actually runs. If you don't, and you have been maintaining a small zoo of hand-rolled QEMU invocations or a VirtualBox install from 2019, this is the moment the tool earns its disk space.
Keep the expectation calibrated: these are minimal cloud images, not desktops. cloud-init handles first boot, `multipass exec` handles commands, and everything else is yours to install — which is exactly the point.
