Ubuntu 22.04

Ubuntu 22.04 Features – What’s New?

A new version of Ubuntu means there has been a few changes, but of course it has also remained faithful to the same old Ubuntu that you’ve come to know and trust for years. We’ll go over some of the new most noteworthy Ubuntu 22.04 features in the section below.

GNOME 42.0

Ubuntu 22.04 may possibly ship with GNOME 42.0 installed. Of course, you will still have your choice to download Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, and a slew of other flavors, just in case you don’t like GNOME. The new version of GNOME has better settings with regards to colors and themes, including dark theme. The new dark theme is better respected across desktop applications and adheres to a standard of colors that make more sense.

GNOME 42 also makes use of libadwaita and GTK 4, so expect things to be looking a little different. The newest version of GNOME will introduce a new screenshot tool and text editor. Since Canonical employs a custom version of GNOME, we have to see if all these new settings will carry over to Ubuntu 22.04. We can also expect a new version Yaru GTK theme with a new option to choose an accent colour. Yaru is a default theme for the Ubuntu Linux developed by user community.

Updated Software & Updates utility will now include the Ubuntu Pro tab from where you can include three stations to your Ubuntu advantage account plus some other features to make your life when working with Ubuntu 22.04 easier.

A new way to update firmware

For years, the Software Center in Ubuntu has handled the updating of firmware. With the release of Ubuntu 22.04, a new GUI application will be unveiled, which is really just a front-end for the fwupd command line utility. This is a right step in the direction of user friendliness and clarity about system updates.

New Ubuntu installer

The installation prompts for Ubuntu 22.04 are going to look a little different, because the installer itself has actually been completely revamped. It sports a much more modern and sleek look, while still reflecting the simplicity of Ubuntu. It was created using Google’s Flutter UI development kit.

Expanded Raspberry Pi support

The new Ubuntu 22.04 will support Raspberry Pi models with as little as 2 GB of RAM, something that it accomplishes through the use of zswap.

PHP 8.1

Ubuntu 22.04 makes the upgrade to PHP 8.1. This is mostly relevant for web developers that like to program in the PHP language. Jammy Jellyfish gives coders easy access to the latest interation of PHP, so they can keep up with the always-changing web technology.

OpenSSL 3.0

A new standard for OpenSSL was released in September 2021. This will be the new version included in Ubuntu 22.04, which will increase security with regards to encryption and man in the middle attacks on the new operating system.

Ruby 3.0

Ruby programmers will be delighted to know that Ubuntu 22.04 has made the upgrade to Ruby 3.0, which was officially released back in 2020.

Golang 1.18

The Go programming language is quickly sweeping the tech world. Canonical has recognized this and included Golang 1.18 with the latest version of their operating system, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.

Python 3.10.0

Python 3.10.0 version will be shipped as a default with Ubuntu 22.04. However, as always this does not mean that you cannot install and change to any Python version you see fit for your programming needs.

Grub 2.06

There’s a new version of grub, which isn’t very noteworthy by itself, but it may effect some users that have a dual boot system, including Windows or other Linux distributions. Grub 2.06 won’t automatically probe for other OS installations and add them to the boot menu. Luckily, there’s a simple fix of adding GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER=false to the /etc/default/grub file and then running sudo update-grub.

We’re not sure if this is an oversight on the developer’s part, or just a new “feature.” It may actually be fixed (read: reverted to its normal behavior) by the time Ubuntu releases. Until then, dual booters beware.

Kernel 5.15

The Kernel 5.15 will come with many new features which includes a new NTFS file-system driver called NTFS3. This will make Ubuntu 22.04 much more compatible with drives formatted for Windows NTFS drives.

A new In-kernel SMB server will provide faster file sharing and more features for Samba servers, which is ideal in a mixed ecosystem of Linux and other types of operating systems.

Of course, new hardware support for AMD CPUs and GPUs, Apple’s M1 chip, Intel Alder Lake CPUs, and other hardware will also be included, along with various other features and improvements.

Ubuntu Pro

The latest daily builds of Ubuntu 22.04 have a notification pop up upon login, asking the user if they would like to enable Ubuntu Pro. Fortunately, there is an option to select “Don’t remind me again” in order to suppress this nag, which will be irrelevant for normal users.

Ubuntu Pro has historically been a support program for AWS customers. But now it looks like Ubuntu Pro may also tie in with Ubuntu Advantage in the future, from what we could observe after enabling Pro on our test system. Ubuntu Pro will also give the user access to Livepatch (install security updates without the need to restart) and extended security maintenance.

Core Application Updates

Ubuntu 22.04 will also come with a slew of updates for some of its most used applications. Including but not limited to Thunderbird 91.5, Firefox 96.0, LibreOffice 7.2.5, PulseAudio 15.0, and NetworkManager 1.32.