It has been approximately two years since Canonical released its previous Long Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu – Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr. Canonical is now ready to release its next LTS and will become available sometime on April 21st. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will be supported until 2021.
The main highlights in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS include:
- “Snaps” - a new robust, secure app format.
- The introduction of LXD pure-container hypervisor with OpenStack Mitaka.
- Support for IBM Z and LinuxONE systems with flat pricing.
- Steps made towards converged Ubuntu across IoT, phone, desktop and server.
- The introduction of ZFS and CephFS for large-scale cloud storage.
“The leading cloud-based operations and the most advanced robotics run largely on Ubuntu, and this new release is the basis for the next wave of their innovation,” said Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical. “We are proud to serve the needs of the enterprise, and research, and millions of personal and non-profit users, with one single shared free software platform”.
Although Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be supported until 2019 it's likely that most Ubuntu users will want to make the jump to the latter version. If you are on Ubuntu 14.04, you won't get the upgrade notification in the update manager until the first 16.04 point release in July, this is just to ensure that any remaining quirks are worked out of the system, users on LTS releases usually want things to work without a hitch.
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS users can prompt the upgrade, however, it's going to take a bit of command line trickery. Open the Terminal application and type:
sudo update-manager -d
Once you've hit enter, the update manager will show up giving you the option to upgrade. Users on Ubuntu 15.10 will be prompted about the upgrade right away from the update manager.
Source: Canonical
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