Ubuntu 26.04 Ends 46 Years of Silent sudo Passwords

Summary

For more than four decades, typing a password after a sudo prompt in a Linux terminal produced nothing visible on screen — no asterisks, no dots, no moving cursor. The blank void was intentional: a guard against “shoulder surfing,” the practice of counting keystrokes to guess a password’s length. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed Resolute Raccoon and due on April 23, 2026, changes that. “Security is theoretically worse since password lengths are exposed to people watching your screen, but this is an infinitesimal benefit far outweighed by the UX issue.” — sudo-rs upstream commit message, enabling pwfeedback by default beforeuser@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt update [sudo] password for user: afteruser@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt update [sudo] password for user: ******** A History Written in Silence The original sudo utility was created in 1980 by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Its silent password prompt was a deliberate security decision from an era when terminals were shared, physical screens were wide-open, and the threat model squarely included people standing behind you counting keystrokes. That behaviour survived — untouched — through nearly half a century of Linux distributions. The tradition began to crack when Linux Mint enabled visual password feedback by default for its own sudo configuration, quietly demonstrating that the sky would not fall. Still, mainstream distributions, Ubuntu among them, maintained the classic silent prompt. Enter sudo-rs: Rust Rewrites the Rules The catalyst for Ubuntu’s change is sudo-rs, a ground-up rewrite of the classic C implementation in the Rust programming language. Canonical shipped sudo-rs as the default sudo implementation beginning with Ubuntu 25.10 — a transition that most users never noticed because the command name and behaviour were otherwise identical. Then, roughly two weeks before the Ubuntu 26.04 beta window, the upstream sudo-rs project merged a patch to enable the pwfeedback option by de...