The OS comes with snaps, LXD pure-container hypervisor, more

Apr 20, 2016 13:00 GMT  ·  By

A few moments ago, April 20, 2016, Canonical announced that it would debut the sixth LTS (Long Term Support) release of Ubuntu Linux on April 21 and unveiled the OS' major new features.

Dubbed Xenial Xerus by Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system has been in development for the past six months, like any other Ubuntu release. During this time, it received numerous under-the-hood improvements, cosmetic changes, updated technologies, and new features.

According to Canonical, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS' release highlights are the implementation of support for snap packages on both desktop and server editions, offering users a new secure and robust app format, the LXD 2.0 pure-container hypervisor with OpenStack Mitaka, as well as support for IBM's LinuxONE and System Z platforms.

Furthermore, the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system is the first of its kind to introduce the CephFS and ZFS filesystems for large-scale cloud storage. Canonical has also made a lot of progress with its convergence vision, bringing the Ubuntu platform much closer to being the first fully converged Linux OS across desktop, phone, server, and IoT.

"The leading cloud-based operations and the most advanced robotics run largely on Ubuntu, and this new release is the basis for the next wave of their innovation," said Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical. "We are proud to serve the needs of the enterprise, and research, and millions of personal and non-profit users, with one single shared free software platform."

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) will be supported for five years

On April 21, 2016, Canonical will officially launch the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, but they wanted you to get a head start and learn everything there is know about its new features. That's why we recommend that you read the announcement in full if you want to familiarize yourself with snaps, LXD, ZFS-on-Linux, etc.

Ubuntu 16.04 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, which means that Canonical will provide users with security patches and software updates for a period of five years, during which the OS should receive a total of five point releases. Come back again on April 21 to grab the download links of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and its official flavors.