Canonical releasing Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS 'Xenial Xerus' tomorrow -- will you download it?





 

Ubuntu is one of the best -- if not the best -- desktop Linux-based operating systems. Many people, including me, trust it for their computing needs every day. Best of all, Canonical releases special LTS versions every two years, offering a super-long five years of support. 

Tomorrow, the latest such LTS version, 16.04, will see its official release. I've been running pre-release versions of this operating system for a while now, and it has been brilliantly stable. Tomorrow's release will be the best Ubuntu ever, featuring things like new snap packages, CephFS, and ZFS-on-Linux. 

"The security mechanisms in snap packages allow for much faster iteration across all versions of Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives, as snap applications are isolated from the rest of the system. Users can install a snap without having to worry whether it will have an impact on their other apps or their system. Similarly, developers have a much better handle on the update cycle as they can decide to bundle specific versions of a library with their app. Operationally, transactional updates make deployments of snap packages more robust and reliable".

The Ubuntu maintainer further says, "also included in this release is support for ZFS-on-Linux, a combination of a volume manager and filesystem which enables efficient snapshots, copy-on-write cloning, continuous integrity checking against data corruption, automatic filesystem repair, and data compression. ZFS-on-Linux is a mature filesystem based on work published by Sun Microsystems under a free software license nearly a decade ago, and which is widely used in cloud and container operations on Ubuntu". 



 

No comments:

Post a Comment