Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Beta Released with GNOME 42 Desktop, Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Beta

Canonical today released the beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series to give the community an early taste of the upcoming features and changes.

With only three weeks before the final release, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS beta is here for early adopters and public beta testers who want to see for themselves what the Ubuntu developers have been working on for the past several months.

Powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series, which brings a brand-new implementation of the NTFS file system to let you read and write data to such drives, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS beta ships with the latest and greatest GNOME 42 desktop environment by default with the triple buffering patch.

You will enjoy most of GNOME 42’s big features, such as the system-wide dark style for all apps and dialogs, as well as the new built-in screenshot UI and the GTK4 look and feel for apps mimicked by the Yaru theme, but you will not enjoy GNOME 42’s GTK4 apps.

Most of the apps included in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS are from the GNOME 41 stack, except those that were not yet ported to GTK4, such as the Nautilus (Files) file manager.

Another cool new feature of the Jammy Jellyfish release is the support for accent colors, thanks to the awesome contribution from muqtadir, the independent developer who also managed to build a Personalize section for Ubuntu’s Settings panel with lots of tweaks for your Ubuntu desktop.

Other than that, as you can see from the screenshots in this article, the Home and Install icons were moved to the bottom right corner of the screen by default, but you can place them anywhere you want, there’s a new wallpaper to match the Jammy Jellyfish codename, and there’s Ubuntu’s new logo on the boot screen.

Under the hood, there’s an updated toolchain featuring some of the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies, including but not limited to GCC 12, Python 3.10, Ruby 3.0, Mesa 22, BlueZ 5.64, PulseAudio 16, xdg-desktop-portal 1.14, NetworkManager 1.36, BlueZ 5.63, CUPS 2.4, Poppler 22.02, and GNU C Library 2.35.

If you want to give Ubuntu 22.04 LTS a try ahead of its April 21st, 2022, final release, you can download the beta version right now from the official website via the direct download link below. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, so don’t install it on a production machine!

If you don’t want to download and test the beta version, you can check out my first look video below to see Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) in action. I have tried to highlight some of the major changes in this release.

Last updated 2 years ago

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