Ubuntu 16.04 LTS released
“Xenial Xerus” comes with a new packages format and several improvements for the enterprise.
Canonical has announced the arrival of Ubuntu 16.04. The new release is a long-term support (LTS) release that’s suitable for servers and enterprise customers. LTS releases are supported for five years, whereas regular releases are supported for nine months.
Ubuntu 16.04 comes with many new technologies and features aimed at enterprise users. This release introduces snaps, a new package format for containerized Ubuntu apps. Snaps will continue to co-exist with .deb-based packages for a foreseeable time. Canonical has added new redundancy features to the ZFS filesystem. The company has also added LXD, a pure container hypervisor with support for the recently released OpenStack Mitaka. With this release, Ubuntu is now available on IBM’s z Systems and LinuxONE mainframe machines.
On the desktop, Ubuntu 16.04 comes with Unity 7.x, which disables the Dash online search by default. Users now have the ability to customize the appearance of menu items and can change the location of the Unity Launcher through the Unity Tweak tool. With this release, Ubuntu has dropped the homegrown Ubuntu Software Center and moved to Gnome Software.
Ubuntu 16.04 and its official flavors are available for download immediately.
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