A look at the changes made over two years of Ubuntu releases

Apr 17, 2018 10:34 GMT  ·  By

Canonical will launch the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system later this month, on April 26, and, since it's an LTS (Long Term Support) release, most Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users would probably want to upgrade.

It's been almost two years since the April 21, 2016 release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system series, which already received four of five scheduled maintenance updates, the last one being Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS, launched last month on March 1, 2018.

While Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS brought up-to-date kernel and graphics stacks from the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) release, there's been a lot of changes happing in Ubuntu since the initial release and we bet that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users would want to know what they get if they'll upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS later this month.

Here's what's new in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS since Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

The most prominent change in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS since Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is the replacement of our beloved Unity user interface with the GNOME desktop environment, though the Ubuntu developers did their best to redesign it to resemble the look and feel of the Unity desktop.

The GNOME desktop environment brings a lot of visual changes with it. One that stands out immediately is that window control buttons have now been moved to the right. The last Ubuntu release to use window control buttons on the right was Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

Another visual change can be seen in the Nautilus file manager, which now features a darkish appearance on the left sidebar. The LightDM login manager was also replaced with GNOME's GDM display manager, using virtual terminal 7 by default instead of virtual terminal 1.

Moreover, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS uses GNOME's on-screen virtual keyboard by default instead of Onboard, and there's now a whole different selection of apps pre-installed in the live ISO image. New apps included in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS since Ubuntu 16.04 LTS are GNOME To Do.

On the other hand, the System Log app was replaced by GNOME Logs if you want to view logs from the systemd journal, and gconf is no longer installed by default as it's been replaced by gsettings, a change that resets the statistics and preferences for the Aisleriot card game when upgrading from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

A lot of other apps from the GNOME Stack received major UI redesigns, including Ubuntu Software, System Settings, Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab), Remmina, and GNOME Calendar, which now has a Week View and supports recurring events. Many of these apps now have a keyboard shortcuts popup in their App Menu.

Ubuntu Desktop 32-bit images are gone, Ubuntu GNOME discontinued

Now that GNOME has become the default desktop environment, the Ubuntu GNOME flavor is no more. Therefore, Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 users will be automatically upgraded to the standard Ubuntu release. They can still use the vanilla GNOME session if they install the gnome-session package and choose GNOME on the login screen.

Last but not least, Canonical dropped support for 32-bit Ubuntu Desktop installations with the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) release, so if you're using a 32-bit Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system, it is recommended to download the 64-bit Ubuntu 18.04 LTS image and reinstall.

Under the hood, Python 3 is now the default Python stack as Python 2 is no longer installed, the GPG binary is now provided by GnuPG2, a swap file is now used by default instead of a SWAP partition for all new installations, systemd-resolved is now the default DNS resolver, and the Encrypted Home option is gone from the graphical installer, which was also revamped.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS also deprecates ifupdown and the ifup and ifdown commands in favor of netplan.io and the ip command on all new installs (a configuration file for netplan.io will be generated in the /etc/netplan directory), though you'll be able to install ifupdown from the main software repositories if you don't like netplan.io.

Moreover, there's now a new networkctl command if you want to see a summary of your network devices, and OpenSSH will reject to use RSA keys that are smaller than 1024 bits. Driverless printing support is available as well, and libinput is now the default driver for mice and touchpads, though you'll still be able to use the synaptics driver.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) is Canonical's seventh long-term supported release, which will receive five years of support with security and software updates until April 2023. The final Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release will be available to download, as well as to upgrade for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 17.10 users, on April 26, 2018.

Update 18/04/18: Added two paragraphs about more internal changes since Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS apps
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS apps
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS apps
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS apps
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS apps
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS apps

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (5 Images)

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS appsUbuntu 18.04 LTS apps
+2more