Venom Linux 3.0 iso is released - 3.0-RC1 user can migrate it by manually changing version in /etc/scratchpkg.repo , /etc/os-release , and /etc/venom-release .
Ubuntu 21.10, codenamed Impish Indri, was released on 14 October 2021. Ubuntu 21.10 uses the 5.13 Linux kernel, which introduces rudimentary support for Apple M1 chips, FreeSync HDMI support for AMD GPUs, a new ‘Landlock‘ security module and support for several new hardware among other changes and improvements.[363][364] This release transitions from GNOME 3.38 to GNOME 40, introducing a horizontal workspace switcher and an improved Activities Overview design. The Ubuntu Dock remains vertically placed on the left of the screen and now features separators between pinned and running applications as well as a persistent trash can icon and USB drive shortcuts. A change was made in the default GNOME 40 behavior so that after logging in, the user will be shown the desktop instead of the Activites Overview.[365] Despite Ubuntu 21.10 shipping with GNOME 40, a few GNOME 41 apps are available. A Firefox Snap is now installed by default on Ubuntu 21.10 instead of the deb package, which remains available for the time being. Furthermore, the Nvidia proprietary drivers now support Wayland sessions. The default Yaru theme was also updated with new icons and Zstd compression was enabled in the main archive, making installations faster. Joey Sneddon wrote in OMG! Ubuntu!, "for me what makes this release most appealing isn’t a specific one-thing, it’s the aggregate total; the combination of new apps, new kernel, new GNOME Shell, new look, and new installer (though not default for now) make the Impish Indri a particularly inspiring iteration of this iconic distro." Dave McKay of How-To-Geek wrote in his review, "If you’re an existing user and any of the hardware support or security features of the kernel are going to have a positive impact on your particular use case, then go ahead and update. If you don’t have an issue that is going to be resolved by upgrading, it’s hard to justify the effort—and risk—of an upgrade. Certainly, there’s nothing here to compel an avid LTS user to leave that safe haven and move to 21.10."
Named for Woody's wooden toyhorse that appeared in Toy Story 2.
Ubuntu 21.04, codenamed Hirsute Hippo, was released on 22 April 2021. Ubuntu 21.04 uses the 5.11 Linux kernel, which introduces smartcard authentication and support for Intel's Software Guard Extensions and improves support for AMD CPUs and GPUs. Wayland is now used as the default on hardware, other than those that have Nvidia graphics processors. Support for drag and drop from the file manager to the desktop was also added. This release was to have used the new GNOME 40 release, but a developer decision was made to retain GNOME 3.38 instead, the same version used in Ubuntu 20.10. This decision was made to give time to address questions about the stability of the GTK4 toolkit, a major GNOME interface redesign and the unknown impact on GNOME extensions and Ubuntu's default Yaru GTK theme. In a review, Joey Sneddon of OMG Ubuntu, wrote, "Ubuntu 21.04 isn’t a game-changing release. Despite the hirsute moniker there’s little nothing hair-raising included, perhaps save for the switch to Wayland — but even that isn’t as prickly as it used to be! But it’s not a release totally devoid of value. Ubuntu 21.04 features a striking new dark theme and makes a raft of smaller UI tweaks that add up to an impressive, polished whole. There are also new installer features, a new desktop icons experience, and (of course) a new wallpaper." Dave McKay wrote in How To Geek, "the Hirsute Hippo behaved well in testing and feels like a solid, stable build. What it lacks in surface glitter it makes up for with many significant changes beneath the hood—even without GNOME 40. The 5.11 kernel, refreshed applications, and system-wide bug fixes and security enhancements are all advantageous. The change of permissions on the home directories is a welcome change, too. It’s nothing that you couldn’t do by hand in other releases, but how many actually bothered?" A review in Full Circle magazine note, "So far in this development cycle we have seen very few substantive changes. Perhaps the most important is the use of Wayland by default. Even though that is a developer accomplishment, it is pretty much 'user-transparent'. So far the next LTS release, 22.04, is shaping up to be very similar to the last LTS release, 20.04, and that is actually a good thing. In a mature distribution that already works well, like Ubuntu, wholesale changes are not needed and would cause a lot of user unhappiness. Ubuntu users today largely like how Ubuntu looks and works and don’t think much in the way of changes are needed. People who don’t like Ubuntu are probably already using something else."
Ubuntu 20.10, codenamed Groovy Gorilla, was released on 22 October 2020. This release is based on the Linux kernel 5.8 which introduces support for several modern hardware devices and protocols. Notable features include support for USB4, AMD Zen 3 CPUs and Intel Ice Lake and Tiger Lake graphics as well as initial support for booting Power10 processors. GNOME 3.38 brings enhancements to the core GNOME apps and tweaked the app grid, among other user experience improvements. Ubuntu 20.10 is the first release to feature desktop images for the Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB and 8GB models) and the Compute Module 4. Older Pi models with less memory may still be able to boot but they are not officially supported. An updated toolchain set includes glibc 2.32, OpenJDK 11, rustc 1.41, GCC 10, LLVM 11, Python 3.8.6, ruby 2.7.0, php 7.4.9, perl 5.30 and golang 1.13. In addition to these, nftables is now the default firewall backend, replacing iptables. In an October 2020 review in HowToGeek, Dave McKay concluded, "we recommend that most people stick with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for stability. Ubuntu 20.10 doesn’t offer any huge improvements. Rather, it just shows that Ubuntu is still a solid platform, making good progress toward its next LTS release in 2022 ... Canonical estimates that 95% of Ubuntu installations are LTS versions. If that’s true, then plainly interim builds won’t appeal to many people who use Ubuntu. Even if Canonical’s figures are slightly off, it’s obvious the vast majority prefer stability and guaranteed long-term support over the incremental benefits of interim builds." Tim Anderson of The Register concluded, "...this is not the biggest of Ubuntu releases but keeps the momentum going for Canonical's distribution, hugely popular for server use on public cloud and becoming more polished for desktop users too." Bogdan Popa, writing for Softpedia, noted of this release, "Ubuntu was, is, and will probably remain the leading Linux distribution out there, at least as far as the number of users is considered." A review in Full Circle magazine concluded: While Ubuntu 20.10 is a really solid release, it has surprisingly few new features for a release that initiates a new Ubuntu development cycle. In many ways this is probably a good sign, though. After 33 releases over 16 years, Ubuntu [is] a very mature Linux distribution and it gets almost everything right. There is not really a lot that needs changing, beyond updating the hardware support for the next generation of computers and also updating the default applications, both of which this release does. These days most Ubuntu users run the current LTS release and only upgrade when a new LTS version comes out. This standard release offers very little to entice most Ubuntu users to switch, especially since it has only nine months of support.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, codenamed Focal Fossa, is the latest long-term support release and was released on 23 April 2020. Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS was released on 6 August 2020. As an LTS release, it will provide maintenance updates for 5 years, until April 2025. This release is based on the long-term supported Linux kernel 5.4 which adds support for new hardware, including Intel Comet Lake CPUs and initial Tiger Lake platforms, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 and 855 SoCs as well as AMD Navi 12 and 14 GPUs. It also enables support for the exFAT filesystem and the open-source WireGuard VPN, as well as integration with Livepatch which allows for reboot-free kernel updates. A new Linux Security Module named Lockdown, disabled by default, was introduced in this kernel release and aims to prevent high-privileged root accounts from interacting with the underlying kernel by restricting certain kernel functionality, disallowing execution of arbitrary code and enforcing kernel module signatures among others. An updated toolchain offers glibc 2.31, OpenJDK 11, Python 3.8.2, php 7.4, perl 5.30 and Go 1.13. Python 2 is no longer used and has been moved to the universe repository. This release uses GNOME 3.36 which brings improvements to the user interface including a revamped login screen and refreshed Yaru theme. Improvements have also been made to the system menu and the installation screen, which now shows a graphical drive checking routine. Moreover, the OEM logo is now displayed during boot. The Ubuntu Software Center will now install packages from the Snap Store, while it also adds an option for selecting the desired release channel to install from. This release also ended all support for the 32-bit architecture. The recommended minimum system requirements for the desktop edition of this release are: 2 GHz dual-core processor 4 GiB of RAM 25 GB of hard-drive, USB stick, memory card or external drive space VGA capable of 1024x768 screen resolution a CD/DVD drive or a USB port for the installer media Internet access is desirable, but not essential Reviewer Joey Sneddon noted in OMG Ubuntu, "tradition dictates that Ubuntu LTS releases play things safer than the interim so-called "short-term releases" by only including features that Ubuntu developers can commit to maintain for at least five years. Focal doesn't buck that trend. But while this means there are few "omg!" changes in 20.04 there are a number of iterative improvements, usability and user interface refinements, and some much needed updates, spread throughout the whole of the system." Dave McKay, writing for HowToGeek, concluded, "Ubuntu 20.04 Is a Great Release. This is a polished, good-looking, and fast release from Canonical." Writing in It's FOSS, Abhishek Prakash wrote, "Since it's an LTS release, stability is of the upmost importance. Canonical team is not going to try any radical changes here. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users would surely notice the visual changes and performance improvements but I don't think you’ll see many changes between 19.10 and 20.04." In a review in DistroWatch, Jesse Smith detailed a number of problems found in testing this release, including boot issues, the decision to have Ubuntu Software only offer Snaps, which are few in number, slow, use a lot of memory and do not integrate well. He also criticized the ZFS file system for not working correctly and the lack of Flatpak support. He concluded, "these issues, along with the slow boot times and spotty wireless network access, gave me a very poor impression of Ubuntu 20.04. This was especially disappointing since just six months ago I had a positive experience with Xubuntu 19.10, which was also running on ZFS. My experience this week was frustrating - slow, buggy, and multiple components felt incomplete. This is, in my subjective opinion, a poor showing and a surprisingly unpolished one considering Canonical plans to support this release for the next five years." In a 29 May 2020 review in Full Circle, Adam Hunt concluded, 20.04 was a "virtually flawless release".
Ubuntu 19.10, codenamed "Eoan Ermine", was released on 17 October 2019. Based on the Linux kernel 5.3 which, among others, introduces compatibility for third-generation Ryzen CPU motherboards and associated Intel Wireless devices as well as AMD's 7 nm Navi GPUs, this release improves on loading speeds and adds several new features. Experimental support for the ZFS filesystem is now available from the installer and can be chosen besides the ext4 filesytem. NVIDIA-specific improvements were made. Proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers are embedded within the Ubuntu ISO image and therefore are available for direct installation from the installer without the need to be downloaded, in place of the open-source Nouveau drivers. Support for the Raspberry Pi 4 platform was added. The installation media now uses LZ4 compression which, compared to the previously used compression algorithm, gzip, offers faster installation times. This was decided following benchmarking of a variety of compression algorithms conducted by the Ubuntu kernel team. Kernel load and decompression times were tested and LZ4 was found to offer decompression as much as seven times faster. Ubuntu 19.10 uses GNOME 3.34 which, among others, adds the ability to group application icons into folders, introduces a background settings panel and a separate Night Light tab as well as improves upon performance and smoothness. A new Yaru light theme was introduced with this release as well. In a November 2019, Ars Technica review by Scott Gilbertson, he concluded, "Ubuntu 19.10 is unusual for an October Ubuntu release in that I would call it a must-have upgrade. While it retains some of the experimental elements Ubuntu's fall releases have always been known for, the speed boosts to GNOME alone make this release well worth your time ... Ubuntu 19.10 is quite possibly the best release of Ubuntu Canonical has ever delivered. It's well worth upgrading if you're already an Ubuntu user, and it's well worth trying even if you're not."
Named for Andy's pet dog, received as Christmas present in the end of Toy Story. With this release Debian for the first time included a mandatory access control framework enabled per default (AppArmor). It was also the first Debian release to ship with Rust based programs such as Firefox, ripgrep, fd, exa, etc. and a significant number of Rust based libraries (more than 450).
Ubuntu 19.04, codenamed Disco Dingo, was released on 18 April 2019. It incorporates the Linux kernel version 5.0, which adds support for AMD FreeSync technology for liquid-crystal displays, Raspberry Pi touchscreens, Adiantum encryption, Btrfs swap files as well as many USB 3.2 and Type-C improvements and several new hardware. Ubuntu 19.04 uses GNOME Shell Desktop 3.32, which includes a new icon set, increased performance, smoother animations, night-light intensity control and advanced application permissions. The updated Nautilus 3.32 file manager now supports favoriting files. A new header bar, as well as 'find' and 'read only' modes have been added to the default terminal emulator. Version 19 of the open-source graphics drivers Mesa is also natively available in this version of Ubuntu. Furthermore, the Grub menu now allows a 'safe graphics' mode, in case of issues with graphics cards or graphics drivers. This option will boot Ubuntu with "NOMODESET" turned on and will allow the installation any proprietary drivers needed by the system. Geoclue integration and fractional scaling in the GNOME Shell for HiDPI displays (currently available only in Wayland sessions and experimentally in Xorg sessions) are also included. Improvements for running Ubuntu on a VMWare virtual machine include integration of open-vm-tools within Ubuntu, allowing for bi-directional clipboard and file sharing. Ubuntu Server 19.04 updated QEMU to version 3.1, allowing for creation of a virtual 3D GPU inside QEMU virtual machines. libvirt was updated to version 5.0 and Samba was updated to version 4.10.x. Samba and its dependencies were updated to Python 3, with the exception of tdb, which still builds a Python 2 package, namely python-tdb. Ubuntu Server 19.04 includes the latest OpenStack release, Stein, and has vSwitch version 2.11.
On 8 May 2018, Mark Shuttleworth announced that the codename of Ubuntu 18.10, which was released on 18 October 2018, would be Cosmic Cuttlefish. The Ubuntu 18.10 installation includes a new theme, named Yaru and the new icon theme, Suru. Installation speeds are faster due to a lossless compression algorithm known as Zstandard. Startup speeds of pre-installed Snap applications were also improved. In a review of 18.10 Joey Sneddon of OMG Ubuntu wrote, "Ubuntu 18.10 'Cosmic Cuttlefish' is a modest update compared to 18.04. The vast majority of notable improvements are tucked away out of sight, 'under the hood' ... Upstream GNOME Shell developers spent the past six months trying to lower GNOME Shell's memory usage and improve the overall performance of the shell, its animations, display manager, and parts of the GNOME extension framework (specifically Gjs), as we touched on in our recap of the new features in GNOME 3.30. Invisible and abstract though these changes are, they're appreciable. So much so that, if I had to describe this release in just one word it'd be 'peppy'. That's testament to the power of collaboration; with upstream devs and Canonical's engineering team working together." Michael Larabel of Phoronix wrote, "Overall, Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" is quite a modest six-month upgrade for being the first past the Ubuntu 18.04 cycle. Exciting me the most, of course, is simply the package upgrades with riding Linux 4.18 + Mesa 18.2 for a much better Linux gaming experience and having moved on now to GCC8 ... What didn't get achieved for the Ubuntu 18.10 cycle is the long-awaited data viewer to the Ubuntu software/hardware survey introduced in 18.04 LTS ... As of writing there's still no public means of being able to view the statistics on these opt-in Ubuntu survey installations. Additionally, the plans for better Android phone integration with the Ubuntu 18.10 desktop by means of bundling GS Connect also didn't happen as planned for the Ubuntu 18.10 cycle."