Today Canonical unveiled the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release, which is a long support throw, that is, it counts with 5 years of support and that for companies or people interested in more years of support, an additional 5 years are offered (as long as they pay for this support) for a total of 10 years.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with codename "Focal Fossa" It is the latest version of the LTS version (released every two years) and that swas widely used in major public cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, use in on-premises data centers.
In technical terms, una of the news of this new version Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and its official flavors (Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Mate, Studio, etc) is the Linux 5.4 kernel, which has among its attributes support for a wider range of hardware (such as AMDNavi 12 and 14 GPUs) and the exFAT file system, for example.
Another of the changes that are implemented with this new version is the native support for WireGuard, As such, this version of Kernel 5.4 did not include it as a feature but it was until Kernel 5.6, WireGuard can be integrated into this version of the Kernel. WireGuard is one of the best known open source solutions for the implementation of secure connections under VPN.
Regarding the desktop environment of the system, we can find Gnome 3.36 that brings with it a new design for applications folder and system menu.
In addition to being implemented a "dark" theme, the "fractional scale" which can be activated more quickly on the desktop and which improves the display of the desktop on high resolution screens.
Now a separate button is provided for this in the display dialog. Developers have redesigned the login screen and lock screenor, which now seem significantly more modern. Canonical has also tuned the performance on Gnome, as Gnome is noticeably faster than the previous version.
As for the system applications, we can find that in this version support for OpenSSH U2F is implemented, In addition, with the inclusion of OpenSSH 8.2, support for U2F / FIDO hardware devices was added to enable hardware-based two-factor authentication.
Distribution now Supports displaying an OEM vendor logo at startup. In general, Canonical worked hard on the boot process, as the kernel and initramfs image now comes in LZ4 compression format, which makes system startup faster.
Also, nginx-core no longer ships with the legacy geoip module enabled by default, as if you are using the legacy geoip module in nginx, you may experience upgrade issues if the geoip module is not disabled in the configuration .
Moreover Python 2 was removed from the system and now by default, version 3.8.2 is used. There are also some changes to the tool chain. Focal Fossa includes glibc 2.31, OpenJDK 11, rustc 1.41, GCC 9.3, Ruby 2.7.0, PHP 7.4, Perl 5.30, and Golang 1.13.
Other than that, this new version includes stable updates For traditional applications, including Thunderbird 68.6.0 (integrates by default the Lightning extension for calendar management), LibreOffice 6.4, Firefox 74, BlueZ 5.53, the 3D Mesa Graphics Library version is now 20.0, while the system PulseAudio sound has been integrated with version 14.0.
Download and get Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
Finally, for those who want to download and install this new version of Ubuntu on their computers or to be able to test it in a virtual machine, They must download the system image from the official website of the system.
This can be done from the following link. Also, it is important to mention that images of UbuntuServer, Lubuntu, Free, Free Mate, Free Budgie, Ubuntu Studio, Xubuntu, and UbuntuKylin (China edition).
As well as images for Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 2, Pi 3B, Pi 3B +, CM3 and CM3 boards.
I will stick with Debian for many years