14 DAY TRIAL // As part of the massive Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) launch, the team of developers behind the official Ubuntu Studio flavor were proud to present the new LTS version of the operating system aimed at GNU/Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiasts.
Yes, you're reading it right, the final release of Ubuntu Studio 16.04 LTS is out, and while it doesn't bring any major changes (see below for details), it remains a worthy contender for being one of the most used Linux kernel-based, desktop-oriented operating system for audio and video production.
Things have changed a little in the past few months for the Ubuntu Studio distro, as a new project leader has been elected, Set Hallström, which took over the project on April 21, 2016, the day of the official release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and will try to keep things alive for the next two years, until the 2018 elections.
"In January 2016 we had an election for a new project lead," reads the announcement. "The team of developers has also seen a positive increase lately, which bodes well for the future. So, all in all, this release marks a new page in the history of Ubuntu Studio and makes the distribution as strong as it has ever been."
What's new in Ubuntu Studio 16.04 LTS
As mentioned before, there aren't many new features implemented in Ubuntu Studio 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), with the exception of the adoption of the Whisker Menu for the Xfce desktop environment, a new font, Noto, improved desktop interactions, and simplification of the Applications Menu to only three software categories, audio, video, and graphics.
Additionally, the ubuntustudio-controls component that can be used to manage realtime privileges for users has been rewritten from scratch, the desktop setup is on par with the one from Xubuntu Linux, the libav library has been replaced with the popular FFMpeg multimedia framework, and the package selection suffered a few minor modifications, like the replacement of DVDStyler with DeVeDe.
You can download the Ubuntu Studio 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system right now via our website for 64-bit or 32-bit computers, but please note that it comes with a warning. "Since it’s just out, you may experience some problems," said the devs, so please check the release notes for the known issues.