Ubuntu Arizona LoCo Team

Ubuntu 24.04, Noble Nombat, was released on 25 April 2024. I have listed some of the changes below.

1. First and foremost there is a new installer. It is built in Flutter and underpinned by Subiquity and Curtin.
2. Wayland is still the default display server but Xorg is still installed. You can still select Xorg from the login screen.
3. It ships with Gnome 46.
4. It ships with Linux kernel 6.8.
5. You will now be able to activate hearing, typing, pointing & clicking, and zoom accessibility during the installation setup.
6. By default the installation is set up only to install the minimalist collection of applications. You must choose the full install to get everything.
7. When you copy files, the information and progress now appear in the lower left hand corner of the screen.
8. There is a new Settings menu option. It contains the Region & Language, Date/Time, Users, Remote Desktop, Secure Shell, and About Settings.
9. Privacy has been renamed Privacy & Security.
10. The Software Center is now called the App Center and is SNAP oriented. Any application that you install will be a Snap application by default if one exists. You can however install deb applications if they are available or by using the terminal.
11. There are a few other minor changes. I have downloaded it and installed it on one of my laptops and have had no issues with the new version. You can do the same. If you are merely wanting to upgrade from 22.04 or 23.10, that will be possible in the August time frame when the first point release is published. Attempting a forced an upgrade before then may result in problems with the operating system.

Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish was released on 21 April 2022 along with all of the official Ubuntu “flavors”. Here are some things that are new. For details just do a simple search with your favorite browser.

1. Wayland is now the default display server but Xorg is still installed. You can select it from the log in screen.

2. There is no longer a “mixed” appearance, the dark header and light controls. Only the light and dark are available.

3. You can finally drag and drop files and folders out of the file manager to the desktop and vice versa.

4. There are now horizontal rather than the vertical work-spaces.

5. Trash is now located on the dock rather than the desktop.

6. There is now a divider separating running apps from pinned ones on the dock.

7. The default accent color is now orange rather than the old purple. However there are 10 colors than can be used in lieu of the default orange.

8. You are now able to create password protected .zip files in Nautilus. Start the procedure by right clicking on the folder and choose compress.

9. Firefox will now be installed as a snap. It will be slow on the first start. The good news is that it will improve the next time you start it. The bad news is that it will also be slow from a cold start. They are apparently working on this.

10. There is a new screenshot tool which will allow an interactive screen snipping tool.

11. There is a proper dark mode for those of you that prefer it.

12. You will now have the option of showing the battery percentage on your panel.

13. There is now a prominent restart option.

14. Ships with Gnome 42

15. Ships with Linux Kernel 5.15

16. There is a new firewall back-end (nftables over iptables).

17. There is a new privacy panel in the settings app.

18. It is the first release to run well on the Raspberry Pi 4 2 GB model.

19. Super + Alt + Up Arrow will display active work-spaces as tabs at the top of the screen. Super + Alt + Down Arrow removes them.

20. The Software Center is now officially SNAPS. However you can still install a Deb packages using Apt or Synaptic.

The ISOs can be downloaded at https://ubuntu.com/#download.

Happy Ubuntu ing

Ubuntu 21.10 was released yesterday, 14 October. It is a standard release and as such is only supported for 9 months. It uses Gnome 40 as the default desktop environment. So what is new? It introduces the horizontal workspace switcher to replace that irksome vertical one. It has a revamped application launcher and it adds multi-touch gestures to make it easier to enter/exit workspace switcher but they are only available in a Wayland session by default.

The Dock is still on the left side of the screen but now there is a separator between pinned shortcuts and running but not pinned apps. The trash can and any USB drives are on the Dock instead of the Desktop.

The Yaru light theme is now default. Apparently missing is the Standard theme. The dark theme can be enabled in settings.

Zstd compression is enabled for the main archive.

Wayland can now be used on systems with proprietary NVIDA graphics drivers.

It includes LibreOffice 7.2, Thunderbird 91, and the latest version of FireFox as well as several Gnome 41 apps and ships with the Linux 5.13 kernel.

It can be downloaded from https://ubuntu.com/#download. There are also links too the various Ubuntu “flavors” at that site on the lower right side of the page. Happy Ubuntu-ing.