New in Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (Focal Fossa) (Aug 30, 2021)
- NEW FEATURES IN 20.04 LTS:
- RISC-V image:
- RISC-V images for SiFive HiFive Unleashed and Unmatched boards are now available, which can also be used as a VM with QEMU on any Ubuntu 20.04 machine. For more details see RISC-V page.
- Updated Packages:
- As with every Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS comes with a selection of the latest and greatest software developed by the free software community.
- Linux Kernel:
- Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is based on the long-term supported Linux release series 5.4. HWE stack updated to Linux release series 5.8.
- NOTE: Users who installed from Ubuntu Desktop media should see the note about desktop tracking the rolling hardware enablement kernel series by default here.
- Notable features and enhancements in 5.4 since 5.3 include:
- Support for new hardware including Intel Comet Lake CPUs and initial Tiger Lake platforms, AMD Navi 12 and 14 GPUs, Arcturus and Renoir APUs along with Navi 12 + Arcturus power features.
- Support has been added for the exFAT filesystem, virtio-fs for sharing filesystems with virtualized guests and fs-verity for detecting file modifications.
- Built in support for the WireGuard VPN.
- Enablement of lockdown in integrity mode.
- Other notable kernel updates to 5.4 since version 4.15 released in 18.04 LTS include:
- Support for AMD Rome CPUs, Radeon RX Vega M and Navi GPUs, Intel Cannon Lake platforms.
- Support for raspberry pi (Pi 2B, Pi 3B, Pi 3A+, Pi 3B+, CM3, CM3+, Pi 4B)
- Significant power-saving improvements.
- Numerous USB 3.2 and Type-C improvements.
- A new mount API, the io_uring interface, KVM support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization and pidfd support.
- Boot speed improvements through changing the default kernel compression algorithm to lz4 (in Ubuntu 19.10) on most architectures, and changing the default initramfs compression algorithm to lz4 on all architectures.
- Toolchain Upgrades:
- Ubuntu 20.04 LTS comes with refreshed state-of-the-art toolchain including new upstream releases of glibc 2.31, ? OpenJDK 11, rustc 1.41, GCC 9.3, ? Python 3.8.2, ? ruby 2.7.0, php 7.4, ? perl 5.30, golang 1.13.
- Ubuntu Desktop:
- Ubuntu Desktop flavour now always tracks HWE (hardware enablement) kernel. It means that from January 2021 the Ubuntu Desktop will gain new major kernel versions every 6 months through to summer of 2022, even if you installed Ubuntu Desktop earlier than this.
- Read more about it on the Ubuntu discourse thread Improvements for hardware support in Ubuntu Desktop installation media.
- New graphical boot splash (integrates with the system BIOS logo).
- Refreshed Yaru theme:
- Light/Dark theme switching
- GNOME 3.36
- New lock screen design.
- New system menu design.
- New app folder design.
- Smoother performance, lower CPU usage for window and overview animations, JavaScript execution, mouse movement and window movement (which also has lower latency now).
- 10-bit deep colour support.
- X11 fractional scaling.
- Mesa 20.0 OpenGL stack
- BlueZ 5.53
- PulseAudio 14.0 (prerelease)
- Firefox 75.0
- Thunderbird 68.7.0
- LibreOffice 6.4
- Network configuration:
- With this Ubuntu release, netplan.io has grown multiple new features, some of which are:
- Basic support for configuring SR-IOV network devices. Starting with netplan.io 0.99, users can declare Virtual Functions for every SR-IOV Physical Function, configure those as any other networking device and set hardware VLAN VF filtering on them.
- Support for GSM modems via the NetworkManager backend via the modems section.
- Adding WiFi flags for bssid/band/channel settings.
- Adding ability to set ipv6-address-generation for the NetworkManager backend and emit-lldp for networkd.
- Storage/File Systems:
- ZFS 0.8.3:
- Continuing with what started in the Eoan release, Ubuntu Focal ships zfs 0.8.3. Compared to what was available in the previous LTS release, zfs 0.8 brings many new features. Highlights include:
- Native Encryption (with hardware acceleration enabled in Focal)
- Device removal
- Pool TRIM
- Sequential scrub and resilver (performance)
- Upstream 0.8.0 release notes: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases/tag/zfs-0.8.0
- Also checkout 0.8.1, 0.8.2 and 0.8.3 for more details.
- Other base system changes since 18.04 LTS
- Python3 by default:
- In 20.04 LTS, the python included in the base system is Python 3.8. Python 2.7 has been moved to universe and is not included by default in any new installs.
- Remaining packages in Ubuntu which require Python 2.7 have been updated to use /usr/bin/python2 as their interpreter, and /usr/bin/python is not present by default on any new installs. On systems upgraded from previous releases, /usr/bin/python will continue to point to python2 for compatibility. Users who require /usr/bin/python for compatibility on newly-installed systems are encouraged to install the python-is-python3 package, for a /usr/bin/python pointing to python3 instead.
- Due to this transition the legacy python and python-minimal packages might be removed during an upgrade, being replaced by the python2 and python2-minimal packages as dependencies of the python-is-python2 package.
- Snap Store:
- The Snap Store (snap-store) replaces ubuntu-software as the default tool for finding and installing packages and snaps.