Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" Beta Released

Ubuntu 20.04 “Focal Fossa” heads toward its final release later this month with the Beta release. Ubuntu 20.04 Beta version is available to download with several changes & new features in the base system.

Support lifespan

Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop, server, and core will be supported for 5 years until April 2025.

New Graphical boot splash screen

The very first thing one will notice on the first boot is the new boot screen. Along with the Ubuntu logo, the Ubuntu 20.04 boot screen also includes the system’s vendor logo.

Updated Yaru Theme

The much-awaited change is in the refreshed Yaru theme. You get settings to change Window colors. There are three options available, Light, Standard, and Dark.

Latest Gnome desktop

Focal also comes with the latest GNOME desktop 3.36. Gnome 3.36 visual and performance improvements. It consumes less CPU for window animations, javascript executions, mouse movement, and window management. For more details, read the GNOME release note.

The most notable visual change in GNOME 3.36 is the new login screen. Check it out.

Besides the new login screen, the GNOME 3.36 includes many changes in system settings design, icons, calendar, system menu, etc. For more, watch the video –

Updated packages

Besides the bug fixes and the updated desktop environment, Ubuntu 20.04 comes with all updates packages, including Firefox 74.0, Thunderbird 68.6.0, and Libreoffice 6.4. The Mesa has been updated to 20.0, BlueZ 5.3.0, and PulseAudio 14.0.

For developers, the distro comes with the technologies update to their latest and greatest versions. For example, glibc 2.31, OpenJDK 11, rustc 1.41, GCC 9.3, Python 3.8.2, ruby 2.7.0, php 7.4, perl 5.30, golang 1.13.

ZFS

Canonical added ZFS filesystem support in Ubuntu 19.10, and Ubuntu 20.04 comes with zfs 0.8.3. zfs 0.8.3 has a big list of changes that you can read here. You can select to use ZFS in Ubuntu 20.04 during the installation.

Snap store

Ubuntu software has been replaced with the Snap store. We have discussed snap packages in detail in this article. Remember that the new Ubuntu does not come with a different software installer but the same software installer in the snap package.

Download Ubuntu 20.04

Ubuntu 20.04 “Beta” is only recommended to install on test systems. Do not trust the beta images to run your live server. I suggest not even think about it 😉

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