Ubuntu 21.04

fox · April 22, 2021, 03:28:29 PM

Ubuntu 21.04 is now available for download, and I expect that all of the variants will be shortly. I upgraded from Ubuntu 20.10 on my iMac. It didn't show up as available when I looked, so I did it on the command line with "sudo do-release-upgrade -d". The upgrade took less than a half hour, and everything seems OK. The change makes Wayland the default display server. So far, I haven't had any problems with it.

Update: one small thing not working in Weyland - brightness controller, which I use to dim the backlight since the keyboard control doesn't work. However, it still works OK when I use the xorg display server instead of Weyland.

Jason · April 22, 2021, 05:23:12 PM

Have you used it long? Any other changes you've noticed or read about that sound interesting?

buster · April 22, 2021, 05:55:58 PM

Is this a short or long term security upgrade?

fox · April 22, 2021, 07:03:51 PM

This is supported for 9 months, so not an LTS. I don't notice any drastic changes. There is a small change in the default icons, a few new wallpapers, Weyland is the default over xorg (but xorg still an option), default kernel is 5.11 instead of 5.8. If you have Ubuntu 20.10 installed, you might as well update. If you have 20.04 LTS installed, you would have to upgrade in two steps and I don't see any compelling reason to.

If you want to preview the major changes, you'll find plenty of YouTube videos and threads on this topic.

Note that the 21.04 update is now available for all the Ubuntu variants. Perhaps there are more significant changes in some of those; I didn't review this for the variants.

Jason · April 22, 2021, 10:25:56 PM

LTS stands for "long-term support". LTS versions are every two years. The last one was 20.04. Our PLUG server uses 18.04. The next one will be, surprise, surprise... 22.04. They're supported for five years.

I sense a new point release of Linux Mint (20.2) is coming.

buster · April 24, 2021, 05:30:59 PM

"I sense a new point release of Linux Mint (20.2) is coming."

No sign in their forum that I'll get it soon. Though maybe no reason to use it anyways.

Jason · April 24, 2021, 08:02:15 PM

Each new release of Mint (e.g. Linux Mint 19) is based on the latest Ubuntu LTS. I took that to mean that each point release was based on each Ubuntu version in between (e.g. 19.1, 19.2). I think I thought this because there are 3 Ubuntu releases in between every LTS version but it's possible that part might not be true. The wikipedia page says they will release a new version or point release when it's ready, not to a specific schedule. But I looked at some recent versions and the point releases usually came a couple of months after each new release of Ubuntu.