Ubuntu News Archives

While Ubuntu 21.10 isn't being released for another two months, the release schedule for Ubuntu 22.04 has been published that is rather notable in being the next bi-annual long-term support (LTS) release.

After a slight delay, Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is available today as the newest point release for the current Ubuntu Linux long-term support release.

Many will recall DFI motherboards from close to two decades ago for their wildly colored "LANParty" motherboards but in recent years the company has been focusing on IoT and industrial hardware where, of course, Linux has much relevance. DFI and Canonical today announced an AMD-powered Ubuntu-loaded "industrial Pi" single board computer.

While Ubuntu normally ships with the very latest GNOME desktop version issued just before release time, with Ubuntu 21.04 they stuck to GNOME 3.38 rather than punting early to GNOME 40. In the Ubuntu 21.10 development packages they since migrated to GNOME 40 but now it looks like they will be sticking to that and not pulling ahead to the near-final GNOME 41.

Ubuntu developers acknowledge "delaying this for a long time" but for Ubuntu 21.10 they are planning to ship its systemd package with the unified cgroup hierarchy (Cgroups v2) by default.

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is expected later this month as the next point release to the "Focal Fossa" long-term support cycle. With this update comes the hardware enablement stack from Ubuntu 21.04 which in turn means Linux 5.11 and Mesa 21.0 graphics support is available as package updates now.

For those wondering what has been going on in the Xubuntu camp for this Xfce desktop spin of Ubuntu, a Xubuntu 21.10 development update was shared concerning package changes and other happenings.

In addition to still working on moving from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04 LTS for its base, Ubuntu Touch has also begun engaging in another important project: supporting Voice over LTE (VoLTE) with Ubuntu Touch.

Thanks to Canonical's distributed workforce with most of their employees working from home even pre-pandemic and the booming Linux ecosystem, the Ubuntu maker performed very well over 2020 and even grew its headcount back above 500 employees and managed to swing from a loss in 2019 to a profit in 2020.

The UBports folks have released Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 as their latest over-the-air update for this mobile Linux platform. Notable with this release is what isn't there - the Ubuntu 20.04 base. Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 continues using now the five year old Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base while the migration to 20.04 is still in progress.

It's coming three years later than originally planned but with Ubuntu 21.10 this autumn the Debian packages will now be compressed via Zstd for offering speedier decompression speeds.

At the end of 2019 "Ubuntu Pro" was announced as Ubuntu for Amazon's EC2 cloud with ten years of package updates/security, kernel livepatching, Canonical Landscape integration, and more. Google and Canonical are announcing today that Ubuntu Pro is now coming to Google Cloud.

Mir continues to be developed by Ubuntu-maker Canonical as a set of libraries and Wayland compositor for building Wayland-based shells with integrated window management and other features to ease the bring-up and catering to business use-cases around IoT and digital signage, among other uses. Out today is version 2.4 of Mir with more features and fixes.

While PHP 8.0 was released at the end of last year, it wasn't added to Ubuntu 21.04 given all the changes at play over PHP 7.4. But now for Ubuntu 21.10, that transition to PHP 8 is now happening to ensure it's in good enough shape for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS cycle.

The UBports community this week released Ubuntu Touch OTA-17 as the latest version of this Ubuntu smartphone/tablet spin that is currently supporting more than two dozen different devices.

Following last week's release of Ubuntu 21.04 "Hirsute Hippo", the Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" cycle has now begun.

Ubuntu 21.04 "Hirsute Hippo" is now available.

Kicked off this past Thursday and running through 7 April is the Ubuntu 21.04 "Testing Week" for helping to test the new changes and catch any remaining issues with there being now just three weeks to go to the final release.

The beta of Ubuntu as well as its various flavors/derivatives is out ahead of the official "Hirsute Hippo" launch later this month.

Canonical today announced the release of the "Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview" as a specialized build of Ubuntu catering to Microsoft's WSL2.

They are a bit late in doing so, but Ubuntu developers are working to figure out if it makes sense to run FSCK "file-system check" at boot time. It turns out Ubuntu Server and other Ubuntu installations making use of their Curtin installation component haven't enabled the functionality for FSCK at boot but now they are (re)visiting the matter.

Ubuntu 21.04 is moving ahead with plans to enable compiler link-time optimizations (LTO) by default for package builds in the name of greater performance.

Recently Ubuntu maker Canonical committed to using Google's Flutter user-interface toolkit as its "default choice" for their mobile and desktop applications moving forward. There is now an Ubuntu Blog post further detailing their interests in Flutter.

As part of planning for Ubuntu 21.04 to use Wayland by default when running on the default GNOME Shell desktop, Ubuntu developers were going to evaluate the standalone XWayland work being pursued by Red Hat initially for Fedora in order to ship newer XWayland code without resorting to releasing a new X.Org Server. That standalone XWayland package is now on its way to the Ubuntu archive.

UBports released Ubuntu Touch OTA-16 as their largest update since the days of OTA-4 when the transition happened from an Ubuntu 15.04 base to 16.04 LTS.

Following the surprise announcement last year that CentOS 8 will be EOL'ed at the end of 2021 to focus instead on CentOS Stream and all the uncertainty that brought with Red Hat now being owned by IBM, new distributions like Rocky Linux were conceived while existing Linux distributions have been looking to capitalize on that move. Oracle Linux has been advertising how it's a great RHEL downstream while Canonical is now promoting how Ubuntu is a great replacement to CentOS.

New restrictions will be in place beginning with Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS this summer to try to enforce better quality releases with less regressions by enforcing better quality control.

Most of you probably haven't heard of DFI much in nearly two decades since the days of their colorful "LanParty" motherboards that were well known at the time, but these days they are focused on the industrial computer industry and have now teamed up with Canonical to partake in the Ubuntu IoT Hardware Certification Partner Program.

In yesterday's Linux distribution benchmark comparison on a Ryzen 9 5900X, you may have noticed some of the Ubuntu 21.04 development benchmarks coming in slower than Ubuntu 20.10 but overall a tight race. That is something I've seen now on other systems too -- such as these results to pass along today from an Intel notebook with the latest Ubuntu 20.10 vs. 21.04 development tests.

Mir, Canonical's Wayland compositor designed for various Ubuntu-focused use-cases for easily constructing new shells, is out with a new point release that packs a fair amount of improvements as well as fixes.

Last month was the delightful news that Ubuntu 21.04 is aiming to use Wayland by default for non-NVIDIA systems on the GNOME desktop rather than the X.Org session. While there is two months to go until the Ubuntu 21.04 release, there still is more work ahead in making that shift a reality.

The second point release to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is now officially released. Notable with Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS is the new hardware enablement (HWE) stack that brings the Linux kernel, Mesa, and related components from Ubuntu 20.10, which means better hardware support that tends to be most notable around better open-source graphics support.

For those wondering where Ubuntu's Mir is being used in current form with their continued development of it these days as a Wayland compositor, it turns out it is being used within smart exercise mirrors as at least one implementation.

Canonical today is shipping Ubuntu Core 20 as their minimal, containerized version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS focused on IoT and embedded uses.

Canonical has been working on developing a new desktop installer built around Google's Flutter toolkit and they aim to introduce it later this year in Ubuntu 21.10.

On top of aiming to use Wayland by default, another high profile change being worked on for this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 is using link-time optimizations (LTO) for all 64-bit package builds.

Ubuntu is going to be trying to switch over to using Wayland by default for the current Ubuntu 21.04 cycle to allow sufficient time for widespread testing and evaluation ahead of next year's Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release.

Last week marked the last Q/A session for the UBports' Ubuntu Touch team working to advance the Linux smartphone platform where they laid out some of their upcoming objectives.

While Ubuntu normally ships with the latest GNOME desktop as of release time, April's release of Ubuntu 21.04 will not be shipping with GNOME 40 but sticking to GNOME 3.38.

With this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 there is more widespread use of "phased updates" for gradually rolling out new stable release updates to help avoid any regressions en masse from coming to light. For years the Ubuntu desktop has employed this phased updates strategy while now with it being plumbed into APT, Ubuntu Server and other versions will by default make use of phased updates.

Ubuntu 21.04 will do away with the existing practice on Ubuntu Linux systems of making new user home directories world-readable.

Ubuntu had a rather successful 2020 with the well received Ubuntu 20.04 LTS debut to continuing to make upstream improvements to GNOME, their adoption in the cloud and Windows Subsystem for Linux remaining strong, and all around Ubuntu being on steady footing across all areas of focus.

There has been some early success geting Ubuntu up and running on Apple's M1 ARM hardware with using the Apple Hypervisor Framework but it looks like a much better experience is on the way with the forthcoming Parallels Desktop for Apple Silicon.

UBports developers and the open-source community continue to push along Ubuntu Touch for smartphones/tablets. Ubuntu Touch still hasn't yet been able to complete the transition from Ubuntu 16.04 to a 20.04 base, but they have made other improvements and new device support with today's Ubuntu Touch OTA-15 release.

Mir 2.2 is out this morning as the newest update to this Wayland compositor and display server.

Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years.

Canonical has announced ETrace as a new application tracing tool designed for debugging and performance profiling of Snap packages but can also be used with any Linux binary applications.

Following last week's Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" release, Ubuntu 21.04 development is now getting underway as the Hirsute Hippo.

The Snap packaging / software deployment effort led by Canonical for Ubuntu and other distributions currently relies on XZ compression of the SquashFS-based archives while moving forward they are planning to make use of LZO compression. Snap'ing with LZO will result in faster startup-times at the cost of larger packages.

Ubuntu for many years has allowed EXT4 file-system encryption when making use of LVM management but for Ubuntu 21.04 it's looking to offer the file-system encryption without having to go through LVM.