Enlarge /. Did everyone know beforehand that a fossa is a cat-like, carnivorous mammal that is endemic to Madagascar? Has anyone else misunderstood it as "Fosse" and thought of choreography?
This is definitely the strangest spring in a long time, with all possible event delays and hardware delays or total cancellations. But one thing that arrived on time? The latest version of Ubuntu Linux.
Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa, as this version is called) is an LTS (Long Term Support) version. This means that Ubuntu's parent company, Canonical, will provide support through 2025. Canonical's LTS versions are called "Enterprise Grade" and tend to be conservative when it comes to introducing new technologies. In the intermediate versions, like last year in Ubuntu 19.10, the company experiments more. Not surprisingly, Canonical estimates that 95 percent of all Ubuntu installations are LTS versions. That said, this is a major update that will update most of the Ubuntu user base at some point.
The good news for Ubuntu fans is that 20.04 was a fantastic release in our tests. This update was very solid in daily use and still offers (optional!) Support for some innovative new functions, e.g. For example, the beginnings of a tool to manage ZFS snapshots. There is also a big kernel bump, and a lot of work has been put into improving and improving the default Yaru theme.
This is an ongoing topic in Ubuntu, where much of what makes it great are small changes and new features that may not be noteworthy individually, but together create a system that is fast, stable, and hard to beat. The security improvements, which are offered almost alone this time, make Ubuntu 20.04 an indispensable upgrade.
However, the Ubuntu 20.04 update also offers many new functions for the various Ubuntu variants. Even if you don't like the standard GNOME desktop, there is great news in Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Mate and others. There is also some good news for Raspberry Pi users who are getting great support for the Pi 4 platform right away (and when I say First Class, I honestly mean better than the official Pi distribution Raspian).
Enlarge /. WireGuard will be included in the tree for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (in the picture) and for the upcoming 5.6 kernel.
WireGuard
ZFS, kernel and more
The first impression of a Linux version often starts with the visual and desktop changes. However, what is really impressive this time is not necessarily the things you see. It's the things that work behind the scenes to make your computing faster, easier, and more secure.
Ubuntu 20.04 ships with a 5.4 kernel that provides support for Intel's Comet Lake chips and the beginning of Tiger Lake support. If you keep track of the kernel, you may be disappointed, as built-in support for Wireguard in the kernel is only available from 5.6. But don't be afraid of VPN users: Ubuntu has ported the Wireguard bits back so you can use Wireguard with your VPN provider today (provided your VPN supports this).
The ongoing work on integrating ZFS into Ubuntu is more exciting. There is nothing new about the usefulness of ZFS, but usefulness is not necessarily the same as usability. Ubuntu developers have put a lot of effort into simplifying the use of ZFS, both in terms of backing up via snapshots and the more important part of simply restoring your system using these snapshots.
The new ZFS functions in this version include zfs 0.8, which supports hardware-accelerated encryption and some performance improvements. The more interesting addition, however, is Ubuntu's Zsys utility, which makes it much easier to see what's happening under the hood.
This is still very experimental and is hidden during the installation process. However, if you click the Advanced Features section of the Disk Partitioning Tool during installation, the "EXPERIMENTAL: Erase Disk and Use ZFS" option appears. It's no longer in scary red text as in 19.10 what I mean by things getting better. Note, however, that this message continues to appear in capital letters. This option is definitely not what you want to use on a production system that is looking for stability in the LTS style.
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When installing the daily beta of Focal Fossa, Advanced Features continues to install ZFS – but is still referred to as "experimental".
Jim Salter
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The ZFS installer layout has four partitions: a primary partition used for UEFI startup and three logical partitions used for swap, boot pool, and root pool.
Jim Salter
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After selecting the ZFS installer and sticking to our weapons, we can get started.
Jim Salter
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A quick check of the apt guidelines shows that zsys 0.4.1 is installed and no ZFS snapshots are yet available on our system.
Jim Salter
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We tried installing a second package immediately after Gimp and saw no new snapshots. A look at / usr / zlib / zsys-system-autosnapshot shows us why.
Jim Salter
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Note the highlighted text. After the minimum interval of 20 minutes (or if you remove or reduce the interval), a keen eye can see that zsys-system-autosnapshot is called before a new package is installed.
Jim Salter
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Now we can see both the snapshots taken before installing gimp and the new set taken before installing mbuffer.
Jim Salter
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With the command zsysctl show we can also see which snapshots the system took for us.
Jim Salter
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Zsys is still at a very early stage of development and some important functions are missing. Note that there is a "save", but no corresponding "load"!
Jim Salter
I have used it for testing since its debut in 19.10 and had no problems. Still, I didn't do much with it until April 20, Beta. My colleague Jim Salter from Ars Technica took a closer look at Zsys and what you can (and can't do) with it is worth reading. The short story is that everything is command-line at the moment and a bit technical for the average user, but it's not hard to see how this tool can be expanded later with a graphical user interface and become a foolproof tool, solid backup system.
If you're not familiar with ZFS, you may be wondering why you should care about it. Finally, there are many ways to back up your data. The advantage of ZFS is that resetting your system is incredibly easy. Suppose you have formatted your hard drive with ZFS and snapshots are enabled. You install a new application and some important parts of your workflow are interrupted. No problem: Without you doing anything, ZFS has already made a backup of the system when you install this new app. All you have to do is restart the grub and choose the image to start from.
This is currently possible in Ubuntu 20.04 (and any system with ZFS installation). The only thing missing is the polish of the user interface. However, it is not difficult to see that if Canonical can create a nice user interface for interacting and managing ZFS, it will be a big selling point.
To be very clear, there are no ZFS snapshots here. These have been in some form for a decade. What Canonical brings to the table is the Zsys administration tool and a solid background in creating GUIs that make tools like ZFS more accessible to users.
In addition to the ZFS additions, there are some other notable changes in Ubuntu 20.04, including moving the Ubuntu software app to a snap package instead of the repository version. This means that developers can release updates for Ubuntu software faster. The store itself has been slightly redesigned and looks a bit cleaner and easier to navigate. For the most part, users will probably not even notice that the store itself is now a quick install, but there is a problem: if you want to install Flatpak apps (e.g. from Flathub), you need to install the store from the repositories, since the Snap version of Ubuntu software does not include the Flatpak plugin.
Other changes in this version include important updates for all common suspects, both desktop apps and tools like Ruby and Python. And note that the Python system is now at 3.8. Python 2.7 has been moved to the universe since the end of its life and is not included by default.
