Version 20.04.6 Release Date: March 23, 2023 (Release Notes)

Starting with 17.10 there is no longer a 32 bit release for the desktop version of Ubuntu.

NOTE: This distro comes on a USB Flash Drive. Please ensure that your system has USB 2.0 + ports before ordering. Distro will come on a name brand USB 3.0 drive that is backwards compatible with USB 2.0.

Basic information about Ubuntu 20.04

Let’s start with some basic information.

• Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years until April 2025 for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, and Ubuntu Core. All the remaining flavours will be supported for 3 years

New features in 20.04

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. 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, Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 & 855 SoCs, 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, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 and other ARM SoCs and 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

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)

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.

Snap Store

The Snap Store (snap-store) replaces ubuntu-software as the default tool for finding and installing packages and snaps.