Ubuntu 26.04 Finally Shows Asterisks When Typing Your Sudo Password

The Linux gods are outside, and they're answering prayers. For decades, typing a sudo password meant staring at a blank screen while you prayed your keystrokes were registering. Ubuntu 26.04 is changing that. When you run a sudo command now, you'll see asterisks for each character. No more retyping three times because you weren't sure if the keys worked.

This change is coming from `sudo-rs`, the Rust rewrite of sudo that Ubuntu has been experimenting with. The upstream devs flipped `pwfeedback` on by default back in February. Their reasoning? The UX was annoying for new users. There was talk about shoulder surfers seeing how long your password is, but the devs basically said *it's okay you'll be fine*.

Why It Took This Long

The silent password thing wasn’t purely a security feature. It was a design decision from the early Unix days when terminals were slow and printing characters risked revealing passwords over serial connections. That logic stuck around for decades probably because nobody wanted to be the person who broke the 'Unix way'. It took a full rewrite in Rust for someone to finally ask *wait, why do we still do this*?

How to Keep the Old Way

If you like the silence, you can revert. Run `sudo visudo` and add `Defaults !pwfeedback` to the sudoers file. That's it. The change persists across updates. You can also adjust the asterisk character if you want something fancier.

What Now?

It's a small tweak, but Ubuntu has been sanding down the rough edges that confuse people coming from macOS or Windows. The Rust rewrite of core tools like sudo is happening for safety and performance, but it's also giving devs permission to rethink some decisions. We might miss the silence, but everyone else can finally see what they're typing.