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It’s that time of the year again, when Canonical kicks off the development cycle of the next major Ubuntu Linux release, in this case I’m talking about Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo), due for release in April 2021.
As revealed last week, Ubuntu 21.04 will be codenamed “Hirsute Hippo” and has a release date set in stone for April 22nd, 2021. Canonical already published an official release schedule so we can mark our calendars for the most important milestones of the six-month-long development cycle.
Development of Ubuntu 21.04 was officially kicked off by Matthias Klose on October 28th, revealing the fact that the goal for Hirsute Hippo is to ship with Python 3.9 as the default and only supported Python 3 version. And, as of today, the daily build ISO images have been uploaded on the main download servers for early adopters.
I took the first daily build of Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) for a spin to see what’s changed since Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla). As expected at this very early stage in the development cycle, the daily build ISOs of Ubuntu 21.04 are completely based on the Ubuntu 20.10 ISOs.
This means that they run the same Linux 5.8 kernel, the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment for the Ubuntu Desktop edition, as well as the same main applications and core components. In time, these will be updated to new releases as they’re available upstream and new features will probably be implemented.
Therefore, I recommend you keep an eye on this space if you’re interested in the development progress of Ubuntu 21.04 as I will try to cover it until the final release at the end of April 2021.
Of course, daily builds are also available for download for the Ubuntu Server, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, and Ubuntu Kylin official flavors if you want to check them out or if you plan to test your apps against the upcoming releases.
Last updated 3 years ago
