Astrologers will be excited to discover a new constellation has appeared in the night sky ahead of the Ubuntu 23.04 launch next month. A rising Lunar Lobster is rumoured to bring good luck to IT managers looking to deploy and manage Ubuntu Desktop at scale. Also ascendant are Ubuntu gamers as the Steam snap moves closer to a stable release. The legacy Ubuntu Desktop installer is beginning its descent this year to be replaced by Subiquity, a new installer that aligns the desktop and server codebases alongside a refined first time user experience. Finally, the desktop environment will soon complete its transition to GNOME 44 to ensure good health and usability improvements for all users.
This is a standard release supported for 9 months packed full of all sorts of new capabilities. If you want a well tested and longer term support then our 22.04.2 LTS version is supported for 3 years. New with this release is a full backport of all the budgie components for our 22.04 LTS user community. We warmly recommend this combination - great stability with the very latest 'everything budgie'. The new release has many new core updates as well as the latest version of budgie itself: The kernel is v6.2; GNOME 44 stack with mutter 12; budgie-desktop is 10.7.1; enhanced hotcorner capabilities with edge support; superb and intuitive tiling support using either/both mouse and keyboard.
The 23.04 release is Ubuntu Cinnamon's eighth release (I had to count). Here's to another eight! Ubuntu 23.04 as a base contains the Linux Kernel 6.2 (with Rust modules, yay!), systemd v252.5, an updated Ubuntu font, Firefox 111, LibreOffice 7.5.2 and Thunderbird 102.10, to name a few. Ubuntu Cinnamon ships with Cinnamon 5.6.7 and the rest of the desktop suite. Overall, not much new, but a handful of quality of life and bug fixes. Here are the notable changes: Cinnamon 5.6.7 - (Full Cinnamon changelog). Bug fixes: keyboard navigation in the Scale and Expo view; GWL app reloading; themes will show up in the theme menu, even if they don't have GTK 2 support; app switcher reverse mouse scroll.
Ubuntu Studio Installer has been completely rewritten from the ground-up and works better on high-DPI displays. It utilizes the Zenity GTK interface to give users a choice of package selection and is even capable of uninstalling entire groups of packages. Ubuntu Studio Installer can still be used to add or remove the Ubuntu Studio Backports PPA as well as switch between the new PipeWire configuration or the traditional PulseAudio/JACK configuration of past releases (which also installs Studio Controls). Wayland is available and installed by default to select upon login and test but is still unsupported. We have done this at the request of KDE so that it can gain more testing and bug reports. We have done our best to configure it with the default theming and to make sure it picks up your settings, but it is possible some things will be missed and not work quite right. However, it has undergone extensive real-world testing and works well on non-NVIDIA systems.
The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 23.04. Xubuntu 23.04 features the latest Xfce 4.18. Xfce 4.18 delivers a stable desktop environment with a number of performance improvements and new features to enjoy. In particular, the Thunar file manager benefits from a new image preview feature, undo and redo functionality, file highlights and recursive search. Xubuntu 23.04 also welcomes Xubuntu Minimal as an official subproject. Xubuntu Minimal is a slimmed-down version of Xubuntu that only includes the bare essentials: the desktop, a few Xfce components and the Xubuntu look and feel. Long-time Xubuntu fans may better know this as Xubuntu Core. After nearly eight years of being a supported, but community-built project, we're happy to finally publish downloads along with the main Xubuntu edition.
By default, Edubuntu's application overview is alphabetized, which makes it a learning tool out-of-the-box so students can see an example of alphabetization and cataloging. Additionally, educational applications are grouped into folders by subject, making the application overview easy to navigate. Using Edubuntu Installer, you can configure the system for a certain age group, whether that be preschool, primary (elementary), secondary (middle/high school) or tertiary (college/university). Each configuration comes with a different set of applications and a different layout and default wallpaper. Using Edubuntu Menu Administrator, administrators can configure which applications are hidden for non-administrator users with the check of a box.
Ubuntu Unity 23.04 'Lunar Lobster' has now been released. It is the first distribution to ship Unity 7.7 out of the box, and brings many improvements to the table, including: a brand-new dash, similar to that displayed in the concepts designed for Ubuntu 16.04; a slightly bigger panel, that is translucent by default and looks much better in light mode; indicator-notification is installed by default, and allows you to see any notifications that may have popped up while you were away; the official widgets implementation, UWidgets, is now supported. And some changes: the Settings app's shell UI has been drastically improved; the launcher BFB is now half-transparent, and fits in with the rest of the default Yaru icons, similar to Ubuntu Unity's custom BFB for Unity 7.5 in 21.04.
Lubuntu previously used the PulseAudio audio system to provide rich audio functionality to our users. However, recently Ubuntu and its flavors have been gradually shifting to using the PipeWire audio server in place of PulseAudio. PipeWire offers several advantages over PulseAudio, including improved Bluetooth support, and more powerful management features for complex audio-related workloads. In order to offer these improved features to our users, Lubuntu has replaced the PulseAudio audio system with PipeWire in Lubuntu 23.04. Since Lubuntu 20.04, the default screensaver has been 'Flurry'. Due to reports of screensaver glitches on certain hardware, we have switched the default screensaver in Lubuntu to GL Matrix. This screensaver features a 3D “digital rain” effect that we have found to be aesthetically pleasing. If you have changed the screensaver yourself, you will probably not notice this change. If you find the new screensaver unappealing, you can change it back to the original 'Flurry' screensaver (or to any of the other pre-installed screensavers) using the Screensaver application. Lubuntu 22.10 and earlier run with no X compositor by default. (An X compositor is an application that can help provide various graphical effects and possibly smooth out screen tearing.) For those who benefited from X compositing, the Compton compositor was provided. We began also providing the Picom compositor (which is based on Compton but is more well-maintained) in Lubuntu 21.04. Starting with Lubuntu 23.04, we have switched entirely to Picom, and have enabled X compositing by default. This will allow effects like panel transparency to work out of the box rather than requiring that the compositor be manually enabled.
On April 21, 2023, the Ubuntu Kylin team announced the release of Ubuntu Kylin open source operating system version 23.04. As a short term support release, Ubuntu Kylin 23.04 comes with Linux 6.2 kernel and Mesa 23.0 graphics driver by default, and is fully upgraded with a series of core system software and base libraries. This version is mainly used to provide a development and testing platform for developers, and you are welcome to download and use it.
The core goal of deepin 20.9 is to provide users with a stable system. This version does not integrate new system functions, it mainly focuses on fixing and optimizing stability issues present in the 20.8 version, in order to ensure system stability. Additions and optimizations: upgraded Qt to version 5.15.8; optimization of the height of the window tube title bar from 40 pixels to 24 pixels; updated system log viewer application; updated system photo album application; updated system drawing board application; updated system software package management application; supported devices with a boot partition and undamaged terminals to automatically repair the root file system in case of damage during the boot process; updated log collection tool; updated software package installer; updated terminal application; optimized the high-performance mode/balance mode strategy.