Prep work has started for the next major release

Jan 16, 2020 15:58 GMT  ·  By

The elementary OS team is kicking off 2020 with a retrospective of the things they managed to do in 2019 and a set of goals for the year ahead as they want to further improve their Linux-based operating system.

In a recent blog post, elementary co-founder Cassidy James Blaede talks about an "intense and record-breaking" 2019 and also highlights some of the major goals for 2020 while also revealing the fact that work on the next major release, elementary OS 6, is on the way and it will be based on the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system.

"Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be coming out this year, and subsequently we plan to release elementary OS 6 with a 20.04 base. We've begun some of the underlying work to migrate to and build against newer libraries, but much of that work still lies ahead," said Cassidy James Blaede, Co-founder & CXO of elementary.

2020 goals for elementary OS

But until elementary OS 6 will hit the streets, something no one knows at this time, the team plans to make various improvements to their beloved GNU/Linux distribution, which won't necessary arrive in the next major release, but quite possible in a elementary OS 5 point release.

One of the goals for 2020 is to make elementary OS ready for Wayland, even if the plan isn't to ship Wayland by default in 2020. Another thing that will be improved this year is to make elementary OS as customizable as possible for everyone by creating user-definable accent colors and delivering a much-anticipated Dark Mode.

On top of that, the elementary OS developers want to significantly improve gesture support in 2020 by implementing support for one-to-one touch gestures. They've already started work on improving gesture support in the Applications menu and they're investigating navigation gestures across other parts of the user interface.

What would you like to see in elementary OS in 2020?