Canonical recently announced that it has joined the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA Connectivity Standards Alliance, formerly the Zigbee Alliance), which will develop new security and reliability standards for the Internet of Things and provide Matter support for Ubuntu Core.

Canonical will join the consortium as a participating member, and Canonical is the first company to offer a major GNU/Linux distribution to join the consortium.

Matter, an Internet Protocol (IP)-based communications standard designed to make smart home devices more secure, reliable and seamless to use, will officially launch later this year. Matter will be adopted by most major IoT hardware vendors as well as virtually every software vendor supporting IoT devices.

Ubuntu Core is Canonical’s stripped-down version of Ubuntu for embedded devices, IoT, and other industrial hardware. It is a containerized version of normal Ubuntu, and compared to full Ubuntu, Ubuntu Core is very lightweight, has a more secure design, and supports transactional software updates using Snaps.

According to Nathan Hart, Product Manager at Canonical:

Our goal is to make Ubuntu Core the best platform for Matter devices. Matter is supported out of the box on Ubuntu Core, making it the fastest and most reliable way to bring Matter devices to market.

Companies currently joining the alliance include Amazon, Apple, Google, Huawei, Samsung, LG, IKEA and other internationally renowned companies.