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With the release of Ubuntu 21.04 “Hirsute Hippo” hitting the streets last week, the time has come for the Ubuntu devs to focus on the next major release of their popular GNU/Linux distribution, Ubuntu 21.10.
Following the Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) release, there will be Ubuntu 21.10, which has been dubbed by Canonical as the “Impish Indri”. They also published the release schedule, suggesting that the development on Ubuntu 21.10 will kick off on Thursday, April 29th, 2021, with the toolchain upload.
Of course, the development will be based on the current release, in this case Ubuntu 21.04, and the release schedule also suggests that the Beta version will arrive for public testing on September 23rd, while the final release is slated for October 14th, 2021.
During the six-month-long development cycle, two Ubuntu Testing Week events are planned on July 1st and August 26th to encourage the community to test the upcoming release.
Other important dates include the Feature Freeze and Debian Import Freeze stages on August 19th, Kernel Freeze stage on September 30th, as well as the Final Freeze and Release Candidate milestones on October 7th.
Of course, it’s too early to talk about the new features coming to Ubuntu 21.10, but Canonical already revealed that GCC 11 will be the default system compiler, and that the upcoming release will ship with GNU C Library 2.34, GNU Binutils 2.37, and LLVM 13 as default. If my math is right, Ubuntu 21.10 could be powered by Linux 5.14.
Canonical also revealed a while ago that Ubuntu 21.10 will be a test bed for its upcoming new Ubuntu Desktop installer written with the Flutter SDK, to make it rock solid for the next LTS (Long Term Support) release, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, due out in Spring 2022.
On the desktop side of things, I expect Ubuntu 21.10 to also be a test bed for the GNOME 40.x desktop environment series. As you know, Ubuntu 21.04 skipped the GNOME 40 desktop, but it shipped with a hybrid desktop environment consisting of GNOME 40 apps and the GNOME 3.38 shell.
As usual, I will keep a close eye on the development cycle of the next major Ubuntu release, so stay tuned on this place for more info about Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri” in the coming weeks and months.
Last updated 3 years ago
