Welcome, Ubuntu 21.04! This preview is for you who are curious about this new version of Ubuntu that planned to be released at Thursday, 22 April 2021 with the codename Hirsute Hippo. It features a hippopotamus as a wallpaper now continuing the gorilla wallpaper from the previous release of 20.10. This includes updates to GNOME (the desktop), improvements to Settings (the control panel), LibreOffice (the document suite) alongside the Linux kernel and Wayland technologies inside. Let's dive in!
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Development Status
The mailing list (ubuntu-announce@lists.ubuntu.com) announced that Hirsute is already in Final Beta status. This includes all the seven other official flavors from Kubuntu to Ubuntu Budgie together. Ubuntu Developers invite us all to test and report bugs to them which can be done automatically just by running the live OS with internet access on. The image file grows to be 2.6GigaByte today.
Release notes (click here).
Announcement (click here).
Availability
Ubuntu Hirsute will be available for desktop, server, and cloud platforms. This Final Beta can be downloaded right away from links below. Please note that these links may be changed or dismissed once the official release finally published.
Desktop and Wallpaper
At a glance, Hirsute changes. Hippopotamus is the theme of the wallpaper. The whole desktop is updated to GNOME Shell 3.38.
LibreOffice and Apps
- Linux kernel updated to 5.11.
- GNOME utilities updated to version 40 (Disks, Disk Usage Analyzer, Image Viewer, Software)
- LibreOffice updated to version 7.1.2.
- Remmina 1.4.11.
- snap 2.49.2
- APT 2.2.2 with phased updates.
- Firefox 87
- Thunderbird 78
New Changes
Speaking about technology, Ubuntu Hirsute got several important changes including:
- nftables as firewall backend instead of iptables.
- Wayland as default, while Xorg is now a second choice.
- Phased updates (explanation here) are now implemented in APT.
Performance
Surprisingly, at this Final Beta version Hirsute runs under 880MB memory idle. I can confirm it even runs on a computer with 1 core processor & 1.5GB memory by testing it on a vm.
Contributing & Help Reporting
Ubuntu Developers invite us to test and report issues to them (which helps them solve issues for everybody else) by following this guide. We can, for example, just run its latest image live session and do everything until an issue reporter asks to send a report (a Launchpad account is required). That would already be a great contribution to Ubuntu.
Next Release
Finally, while Ubuntu Hirsute Hippo (H and H) is waiting to be released, the next release will be 21.10 with the designated codename I and I with the release date should be October this year. We will be waiting for the codename to be published as well as of course the Ubuntu itself. To close this preview I say to everyone, happy testing!
Further Readings
This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.