Today is the big day for Canonical and their partners. Ubuntu 20.04 'Focal Fossa' is officially released as their new LTS (Long Term Support) edition along with other desktop flavours like Ubuntu MATE. If you're moving from the previous LTS, you're in for quite a shock. It's a massive release.
Why use a LTS release over the interim Ubuntu releases? The key point is stability. These releases are supposed to be what you go for if you want the best possible experience.
Some of the main changes include:
- Linux Kernel 5.4 and Mesa 20.0 - bringing with it plenty of new hardware support.
- Feral GameMode integration (more info).
- Software Updates: Firefox 75.0, Thunderbird 68.7.0, LibreOffice 6.4.
- ZFS storage upgrades.
- OEM logo now displays during boot up.
- Snap Store replaces the Ubuntu Store.
- A theme refresh (pictured below) with a Light / Dark switcher.
Pictured: A shot to show the difference in the Light / Dark theme.
You can find out more and download from the below links. Your choice depends on which desktop environment you wish to have. Each edition also has their own release notes and highlighted features, with a lot of work going into each one to improve the out of the box experience:
- Ubuntu (GNOME 3.36) - release notes
- Ubuntu MATE (MATE Desktop 1.24) - release notes
- Kubuntu (Plasma 5.18 LTS) - release notes
- Xubuntu (Xfce 4.14) - release notes
Something else that's worth a read is Canonical's recent survey for 20.04, which they've now published online. Nice to see them be open about things, quite refreshing indeed.
I have to say, I've been running Ubuntu 20.04 during the development cycle as a daily-driver on my work laptop and it hasn't failed me. It's smooth, responsive and it looks fantastic now. They did a great job on tweaking the look. Most importantly though, it's been as stable as a rock. Possibly my favourite Ubuntu release yet.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
With all the positive reactions here, I forced the upgrade from 18.04, as it was a relatively fresh install anyway. I think it's the first time that upgrading from one LTS to the next didn't break the graphics driver, so that's a positive :-).
It didn't, however, go totally smooth. For one it came up with python2 as the default interpreter instead of python3 (the only package actually still depending on python2 being mercurial, which I cannot get rid of, unfortunately). That caused unity-mail to crash, which is still my preferred notification app.
My gnome extensions also weren't updated automatically, and while a notification popped up that updates were available, it took me a while to figure out that what looked like a settings button was actually the button to load the update. But that's on Gnome, not Ubuntu. Also, for some reason, gnome-shell-extension-prefs was not or no longer installed, so extension preferences did not work initially.
But the worst was the new theme. I hate black in particular and dark themes in general. So I switched to the light variant, only to find that all console windows still sported a black window border. Well, turns out console has its own theme settings that for some reason is not following the system default. At least the upgrade preserved my desktop background, but I still have to change grub to show something other than black & white.
And finally, none of the few PPAs I use is yet available for 20.04. Though I guess this will be only a matter of time.
On the whole, I'm content with the updated system, but there's nothing to be ecstatic about.
I had a look at my 20.04 installs regarding python. My desktop has /usr/bin/python which dpkg -S /usr/bin/python says is from the package python-is-python2. The description of that package is:
symlinks /usr/bin/python to the DEPRECATED python2
In Ubuntu, all python packages use explicit python3 or python2
interpreter and do not use unversioned /usr/bin/python at all. Some
third-party code may still be python2 based, yet may use
/usr/bin/python.
.
This is a convenience package which ships a symlink to point
/usr/bin/python interpreter at the current default python2. It may
improve compatibility with obsolete 3rd-party software, whilst
breaking some modern software.
.
This package will be installed upon upgrades to Ubuntu 20.04, if
DEPRECATED python2 was installed.
.
python2 is DEPRECATED and will not be provided in the future Ubuntu
release. It is recommended to remove python2 and this package after
ensuring that only python3 is in use.
.
No packages may declare dependencies on this package.
My other 20.04 systems do not have /usr/bin/python at all. Trying to run python in a terminal gives:
Command 'python' not found, did you mean:Installing python2 is not even mentioned:-)
command 'python3' from deb python3
command 'python' from deb python-is-python3
So python or python2 are not default, that is python3, you got python pointing to python2 since you have python2 installed, and unity-mail has a bug if it looks at /usr/bin/python and fails if its python2.
I had a look at my 20.04 installs regarding python. My desktop has /usr/bin/python which dpkg -S /usr/bin/python says is from the package python-is-python2. The description of that package is:That explains that. It was easy enough to figure out and fix the problem, so no big deal. I just checked and mercurial is on the way to add support for Python 3, so hopefully 2.7 can finally die, at least on my system :-).[...]
This package will be installed upon upgrades to Ubuntu 20.04, if
DEPRECATED python2 was installed.
[...]
UltraViolet Apr 26, 2020
i hope 'Fractional Scaling' is refined sooner rather than later as i would love to scale my display to 125%
That's... one of the features that's included in 20.04 for Gnome. The other desktop environments have had it for a long time already.
i've tried using it in 20.04 but it doesn't run very well
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