Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Slated for Release on April 21st, 2022

Ubuntu 22.04

Canonical’s Brian Murray recently published a draft release schedule for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS operating system release, currently set for a final release date in late April 2022.

While Canonical is still working hard to finish the last details of the forthcoming Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) release, which will see the light of day on October 14th, 2021, they are already planning on the next major release, Ubuntu 22.04.

But Ubuntu 22.04 will not be an ordinary release. In fact, it will be the next LTS (Long-Term Support) series, supported for at least 5 years, and, according to the release schedule published by Brian Murray, development will kick off with the usual toolchain upload just a week after the release of Ubuntu 21.10, on October 21st.

The Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release schedule also suggests that there will be two optional Ubuntu Testing Weeks, where members of the Ubuntu community will be able to participate in a public testing event, and the Beta release is planned for March 31st, 2022.

The Feature Freeze stage is set for February 24th, along with the Debian Import Freeze, while the Kernel Freeze and Final Freeze stages are planned for April 7th and April 14th respectively. After six months of hard work, the final release will hit the streets on April 21st, 2022.

Of course, it’s too early to know the new features of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, but being a long-term supported release, most probably Canonical will stick with well-tested components for that extra stability and reliability.

One thing is for sure, Ubuntu 22.04 will be the first Ubuntu LTS release to ship with the latest GNOME 40 desktop environment series. Most probably, it will feature a recent release like GNOME 41 or 42, which could mean trouble for those upgrading from the current LTS release, Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa), which ships with GNOME 3.36.

Under the hood, it looks like PHP 8.1 will be there, and there should also be GCC 11.x as default system compiler and Linux 5.16 as default kernel series, but I won’t be surprised to see the long-term supported Linux 5.15 series as the final kernel for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, which will be a smart move from Canonical.

Last updated 3 years ago

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