John Bokma's Hacking & Hiking

Two months with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on a GMKtec NucBox M6 Ultra

October 20, 2026

Installation with a hiccup

Two months ago a NucBox M6 Ultra by GMKtec arrived on a Saturday at my house. In the early evening I had replaced the Windows 11 Home it came with, with a fresh install of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The installation did have a minor hiccup: when a window popped up regarding a UEFI dbx update, I selected not to restart the system afterwards. And somehow the installation got stuck. After having watched a movie, I tried to restart the system, as it was still stuck. But no luck, so I unplugged the power cable, reconnected and booted again from the USB thumb drive with Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. And this time the installation was successful.

Why Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

The main use for the NucBox M6 Ultra was going to be to make some small improvements to a Perl program I had written that used the Perl version of wxWidgets, a cross-platform GUI library. Because the program I had written ran on Windows 10 (or 11) I needed a Windows environment. So I installed Oracle VirtualBox and created a Windows 10 virtual machine in which I installed Strawberry Perl for Windows and the, for the project required, Perl dependencies via CPAN. (Days later, I bumped into the fact that I had allocated too little disk space, 30GB if I recall correctly, for the virtual machine and had to do the installation again, using a virtual disk with 50GB this time).

The reasons I use Ubuntu with a virtual machine instead of using the Windows 11 Home edition that came with the NucBox M6 Ultra? First, the git repository resides on a Mac mini. Just copying the files to Windows 11 gives all kind issues. Second, I like Emacs for editing. Now, I could install Emacs on Windows 11 and use git to connect to a repository on my Mac mini but a virtual machine and sharing a directory with the software under development with the guest was less of a hassle to me; I'm more at home on Linux.

After reading the above you might wonder why not a virtual machine on macOS? Well, that was how I developed most of the program to begin with. But the machine, a Mac mini late 2014, I used back then died about a year ago: the fusion drive's SSD stopped working and somehow I couldn't make the hard drive work by itself. I replaced the Mac mini shortly after with a refurbished one, also late 2014, but with only 8GB of RAM instead of 16GB and a slower processor. Running a virtual machine with Windows 10 would have been possible but far from pleasant experience. Hence, the NucBox M6 Ultra.

In the near future I want to replace the severely outdated Mac mini with a more recent model but I am still undecided whether this is going to be a mini with an M6 or M5 Pro processor. Moreover, in order to run non-ARM Windows 10 or Windows 11 emulation is required because the program I wrote requires a non-ARM processor. This might make the system a bit slow, hence the NucBox.

The Software

I installed the following software over the days that came:

I use the Gnome desktop as is. With the only exception, that after several days I used Settings to move the Ubuntu Dock (Dash) to the bottom of the screen and turned Panel Mode off to stop the Dock from extending to the screen edges. Even though now the layout resembled macOS it took me a short while to get used to the panel's new location.

The Feel

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS on the GMKtec NucBox M6 Ultra with 512GB SSD and 16GB memory and an AMD Ryzen™ 5 7640HS feels very snappy. While developing and listening to streamed music I do get close to the 16GB of memory it has but that's to be expected with several modern applications and a virtual machine with 2GB assigned to the guest.

I also did a few speed tests with tumblelog. Generating Plurrrr from a 3.1M Markdown file took just a handful of seconds. While on my severely outdated Mac mini, the generating of all the HTML files and two feeds took at least half a minute. See Benchmarking tumblelog on a GMKtec NucBox M6 Ultra.

Also, setting up a Brother AirPrinter was not that hard. It would have been even easier if I had used the GUI instead of the command line, as pointed out to me on Usenet by Lawrence D'Oliveiro.

The Issues

Does Ubuntu 26.04 LTS run without any issues? Sadly, no. Issues encountered so far are:

For the latter, Claude recommends to try:

systemctl --user restart pipewire pipewire-pulse wireplumber

I haven't tried this as I am no longer running Dopamine thanks to Spotify (and my brother Marco for having me added to his Spotify Premium family subscription).

The crashes of VirtualBox are not really a deal breaker to me as I do most testing in short sessions and it's not an issue to start a fresh one.

At one point both Transmission and "Show Apps" no longer had a visible icon in the dock, nor was there a person icon on the lock screen. Restarting Ubuntu fixed this. Talking about restarting: Ubuntu requires this quite often after an update, at least a few times a month in my experience.

Finally, a week ago, or so, the WiFi stopped working. Actually, Spotify kept streaming but I couldn't browse (DNS issue?). As I had also done some updates I decided to restart with update but then the NucBox didn't boot. After waiting for several minutes I unplugged the computer and plugged it back in, somewhat afraid it wouldn't come back. But Ubuntu booted and all was fine.

Conclusion

While I like the look and feel of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS something can be said about the issues I encountered. Especially the crashing of applications, the disappearance of icons, and WiFi suddenly not working. None is really a deal breaker to me but I can imagine that for a beginner those are.