14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical has officially open today the development cycle of the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series, which is expected to be released next spring.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be the next long-term supported version of the world's most popular GNU/Linux distribution, slated for release on April 23rd, 2020. It's dubbed "Focal Fossa" to keep it in tone with the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) movement, and will most probably ship with well-tested components.
While the daily ISO builds have appeared on Canonical's download servers since last week, the development cycle started on October 24th with the toolchain upload, which consists of some upgraded components, such as Python 3.8 (the goal is to offer Python 3.8 as the only Python3 version), Perl 5.30, and support for IBM z13 systems on s390x builds.
"Focal Fossa is now open for development, with the syncs from unstable done and built, and autopkg testers trying to catch up," said Matthias Klose in a mailing list announcement. "While the Python2 removals imported from Debian are just syncs like any others, it's worth pointing out that some uncoordinated removals are causing some churn."
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Beta arrives on April 2nd, 2020
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) will follow the same six-month development cycle that Canonical used since the first Ubuntu release 15 years ago, but will continue the trend of last few releases to no longer offer Alpha images for public testing. As such, the Beta version will be the first real life testing image offered to the community.
The Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Beta release is expected to hit the streets on April 2nd, 2020, with only three weeks before the final release on April 23rd. Until then, those who want to take Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) for an early test drive will have to rely on the daily builds, which are now available to download for all official flavors.