The distro will receive three years of support

Apr 21, 2016 22:20 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu GNOME team has announced today, April 21, 2016, the official release of the Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), as part of the launch of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system.

It's been three years since the promising Ubuntu GNOME distribution was started, which later became an official Ubuntu flavor due to the demand from the community to use a pure GNOME desktop environment on top of a solid Ubuntu Linux base, which was not technically possible because of dependency conflicts with the Unity interface.

Unfortunately, we would have loved this distro more if it could ship with the latest version of the GNOME desktop environment in time, but being able to upgrade at a later time is also a good thing. Therefore, Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS launches today with the GNOME 3.18 desktop environment.

"The brave fearless volunteers behind Ubuntu GNOME is very happy to announce the official release of Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS supported for 3 years and this is our 2nd official Long Term Support (LTS) version," said the maintainer of the Ubuntu GNOME operating system in the official release announcement.

Here's what's new in Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS

Release highlights of Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS include three years of support with critical security patches and latest software updates, the GNOME Software package manager as a replacement for the now-deprecated Ubuntu Software Center app, as well as better support for installing language packs, and iBus improvements.

The GNOME Calendar and GNOME Logs applications are now installed by default, the GNOME Builder IDE (Integrated Development Environment) can be found in the main repositories, there's now support for installing Snappy packages in the "snap" format, and a root-less X.Org session is now available, along with support for a GNOME Classic session.

Another interesting aspect of the Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS operating system release is that it includes an experimental Wayland session, which users can enable if they install the gnome-session-wayland package. Then, the "GNOME on Wayland" option will be available on the login screen.

Default applications of Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) include the Mozilla Firefox web browser, LibreOffice office suite, Nautilus file manager, Gedit text editor, as well as the GNOME Tweak Tool utility. The OS ships with Linux kernel 4.4 LTS. Download the Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS ISO images right now via our website.