Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) released

The Ubuntu team is very pleased to announce our sixth long-term support release, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core.

Codenamed “Xenial Xerus”, 16.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is the first long-term support release available for the new “s390x” architecture for IBM LinuxONE and z Systems, as well as introducing the new Ubuntu MATE community flavour.

The Linux kernel has been updated to the 4.4.6 longterm maintenance release, with the addition of ZFS-on-Linux, a combination of a volume manager and filesystem which enables efficient snapshots, copy-on-write cloning, continuous integrity checking against data corruption, automatic filesystem repair, and data compression.

Ubuntu Desktop has seen incremental improvements, with newer versions of GTK and Qt, updates to major packages like Firefox and LibreOffice, and stability improvements to Unity.

Ubuntu Server 16.04 LTS includes the Mitaka release of OpenStack, along with the new 2.0 versions of Juju, LXD, and MAAS to save devops teams time and headache when deploying distributed applications – whether on private clouds, public clouds, or on developer laptops.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS introduces a new application format, the ‘snap’, which can be installed alongside traditional deb packages. These two packaging formats live quite comfortably next to one another and enable Ubuntu to maintain its existing processes for development and updates.

The newest Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu are also being released today. More details can be found for these at their individual release notes:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseNotes#Official_flavours

Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Core, and Ubuntu Kylin. All the remaining flavours will be supported for 3 years.

To get Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

In order to download Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download

Users of Ubuntu 15.10 will be offered an automatic upgrade to 16.04 LTS via Update Manager shortly. Users of 14.04 LTS will be offered the automatic upgrade when 16.04.1 LTS is released, which is scheduled for July 21st. For further information about upgrading, see:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/upgrade

As always, upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge.

We recommend that all users read the release notes, which document caveats, workarounds for known issues, as well as more in-depth notes on the release itself. They are available at:

http://wiki.ubuntu.com/XenialXerus/ReleaseNotes

Find out what’s new in this release with a graphical overview:

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop

http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/features

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but aren’t sure, you can try asking in any of the following places:

• #ubuntu on irc.freenode.net
• http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
• http://www.ubuntuforums.org
• http://askubuntu.com

Help Shape Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at:

http://community.ubuntu.com/contribute

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, netbooks and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional services including support are available from Canonical and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/support

More Information

You can learn more about Ubuntu and about this release on our website listed below:

http://www.ubuntu.com

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

Originally posted to the ubuntu-announce mailing list on Thu Apr 21 16:17:59 UTC 2016 by Adam Conrad, on behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team