Looks Like Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Will Be Powered by Linux 5.15 LTS, Ship with GNOME 42

Ubuntu 22.04 GNOME

Canonical recently shared a few details about their plans for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS operating system series regarding the GNOME and Linux kernel stacks.

Due for release on April 21st, 2022, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) is currently under heavy development, and it will be Canonical’s next long-term supported (LTS) series, which will receive software and security updates for at least 5 years.

Being an LTS series, Ubuntu 22.04 will be a more conservative release, like all previous Ubuntu LTS releases, which means that it won’t ship with bleeding-edge technologies, but stick to well tested ones instead.

As you know, Ubuntu’s desktop environment is based on the upstream GNOME stack, which will receive a major update this Spring, to version 42, a release that introduces numerous ports to the latest and greatest GTK4 application framework, as well as a new dark style preference for all GNOME apps, through libadwaita.

Canonical employee Sebastien Bacher revealed the fact that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS’s desktop will be based on the GNOME 42 stack, which is good news for Ubuntu users, but, unfortunately, it won’t ship with GTK4 apps.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will most probably use GNOME 41 apps, just like its predecessor, Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri).

On the Linux kernel front, Sebastien Bacher said that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will stick to the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series by default, which will be supported at least until October 2023, when Canonical will release Ubuntu 23.10, whch is also good news for an LTS operating system.

However, the developer also shared some good news for bleeding edgers, revealing the fact that the OEM and HWE (Hardware Enablement) kernel flavors will probably be upgraded to Linux kernel 5.17 at some point during Ubuntu 22.04’s life cycle.

“On the applications front we will be more conservative, avoiding GTK4, at least for the software we install by default,” said Sebastien Bacher, Technical Lead at Canonical. “The plan is to use [Linux] 5.15 for the [Ubuntu 22.04] LTS but the OEM and HWE variants will get [Linux] 5.17 as some point.”

I know some of you had high hopes for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to ship with Linux kernel 5.16 as it includes new drivers for your hardware, so you will probably have to wait until the Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS point release sees the light of day to get a newer kernel, the one from the Ubuntu 22.10 release in late October 2022.

On the other hand, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) promises a performance boost for Raspberry Pi 4 users, implementing features like zswap, lz4, and z3fold, which should provide for a smoother Ubuntu Desktop experience on the Raspberry Pi 4 model with 2GB RAM.

Last updated 2 years ago

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