Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, launched Ubuntu 22.04 LTS today, 21 April. Indeed, a Long Term Support version, which will be supported for 5 years after its release, meaning that it will have updates until April 2027.
The new LTS, codenamed ‘Jammy Jellyfish’, of course has a number of new features and especially if you upgrade from 20.04, you will encounter some (big) visual changes. If you are currently using Ubuntu 21.10, then some of these upgrades will already be familiar to you, but even then there are still plenty of new things to discover.
As well as a number of visual changes, there are also some ‘under the bonnet’ changes. Most notable is the new GNOME42 version with its new Dock mode, which can also be resized. Other notable changes include Accent Colour Selection, which lets you customise Ubuntu’s colour scheme, and the new screenshot and screencast tool. The new Multitasking setting makes it possible to create so-called ‘hot-corners’: with this option enabled, you can call up the activity window by moving the cursor to the top left corner of the screen. You can also influence the number of workspaces and their behaviour: In case of a multi-monitor setup, you can choose whether the workspace should be shown on all monitors, or only on the primary monitor.
The Flutter-based installer integrates seamlessly into the Ubuntu desktop, as does improved support for (users of) Raspberry Pi hardware.
On the performance front, there has been an increase in support for triple frame buffering (to improve GPU rendering), the OS features hardware-accelerated rendering in the GNOME web browser and Wayland is now the default graphics display server.
Linux Kernel 5.15 adds many new hardware support features, including systemd — oomd integration for better low memory handling and the implementation of Tracker indexing has reduced memory usage by 50%.
Finally, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS runs on Linux Kernel 5.15. Jammy Jellyfish could be one of Ubuntu’s best releases. Apart from its polished appearance, new applications and significant performance boost, Jammy Jellyfish is also a good choice for new Linux users.
From today, we are supplying our laptops and mini computers with the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The latest version is now available as download. Users with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS can perform the upgrade via the terminal with: sudo do-release-upgrade.