Canonical is gearing up for the release of the next LTS (long term support) version of Ubuntu, with a first Beta now available for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat).
While the Beta is not intended for production use the developers said that the Beta is "known to be reasonably free of showstopper image build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of 24.04 LTS that should be representative of the features intended to ship with the final release expected on April 25, 2024".
For gamers, you'll be pleased to know this release ships with the vm.max_map_count value boosted to 1048576, which is needed for certain games to run, this matches up with Fedora and now Arch Linux too.
A Games page has also been added to the Ubuntu App Center, the mail app Thunderbird version 115 has been moved to a Snap package, GNOME upgraded to version 46, you also get Firefox 124 and LibreOffice 24.2 and various upgrades to other included software like Pipewire 1.04. You're also getting kernel 6.8 as standard.
Pictured - Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) Beta
There's a few app changes too like the default install only being "minimal", but you can select "extended selection" to have stuff like LibreOffice and Thunderbird installed. GNOME Snapshot replaces Cheese for webcams and Games are no longer installed by default. Various improvements to the look and feel of their Flutter-based installer too with it being more customizable.
Plenty of security improvements have been implemented too like some tweaks to the Ubuntu kernel to restrict the use of unprivileged user namespaces, TLS 1.0, 1.1 and DTLS 1.0 are forcefully disabled, they said that packages are now "built with security-hardening features which stop many undiscovered security vulnerabilities, rendering them unexploitable" and more.
Various other upgrades included too like GCC 14, Python 3.12, OpenJDK 21, LLVM 18, Rust 1.75, Golang 1.22 and .NET 8.
Ubuntu 24.04 is also the first LTS release that supports the Raspberry Pi 5 with both arm64 server and desktop images.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until June 2029.
You can find the downloads on the Ubuntu website. Release notes on their forum.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: fenglengshunFor me, Ubuntu and anything Ubuntu-based just feels archaic. I've hopped on the NixOS and Universal Blue (Bazzite and Bluefin/Aurora primarily) train, and nowadays I can just define my system through a config file.Uh . . . the way of the future, I'm sure. This is how we'll get all those Windows and Mac users into the fold--letting them define their system through a config file! Yup, I feel so archaic now.
Quoting: GBGamesQuoting: fenglengshunFor me, Ubuntu and anything Ubuntu-based just feels archaic. I've hopped on the NixOS and Universal Blue (Bazzite and Bluefin/Aurora primarily) train, and nowadays I can just define my system through a config file. uBlue goes even further with enabling creating whole distro image and ISOs with all of my configs in it.
I have been using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and planned to upgrade to 22.04 LTS when I was done with a project (and maybe by the time I am done I just go to 24.04 LTS). I have not heard of NixOS, but it sounds kinda awesome?
It sounds like they took the idea of DevOps and applied it to your personal operating system.
I'm not sure if I'll make time to learn it and might just stick with Ubuntu, but thanks for bringing it to my awareness.
I'm doing a presentation in uni on it that's why I installed it, but I am already loving it.
It is completely different from almost every single distro out there, there is one other distro which is kind of similar, the GNU Guix one I believe. Obviously not counting spin-offs like Snowflake OS (Which I discovered only after installing NixOS), which, from what I can tell, tries to be what Ubuntu is to Debian for NixOS, though NixOS is easy enough, if you don't mind config editing in a text editor.
It's so radically different that I can't possibly list all the things which make it special, but just as food for thought, my /bin folder only has a single binary in it, 'sh', that's it. Everything else is in /nix/store.
And yes, you can make non-destructive changes and easily revert back to a working configuration. I use Plasma 6 with SDDM, just to try it, I switched to GDM and Gnome... it just deleted Plasma while I was running it, after a while I was about to hit the power button because nothing was responding any more, right before I had the chance I saw a GDM login screen, logged in to a fully functioning Gnome desktop. I was blown away. When restarting, I selected an older boot entry (they are generated after every change you make) and my entire Plasma desktop was still there the way I left it. I love it.
Obviously all the packages are clogging up your harddrive, so you need to periodically delete old configurations and packages, which you can easily automate.
fenglengshun Apr 18
Quoting: Purple Library GuyUh . . . the way of the future, I'm sure. This is how we'll get all those Windows and Mac users into the fold--letting them define their system through a config file! Yup, I feel so archaic now.You don't need to go full advanced mode on it. There are many people who uses Bazzite as SteamOS replacement (I'd argue it's already better than current SteamOS). In fact, I got into uBlue as a whole by installing Fedora Silverblue and then, with a single rpm-ostree rebase command, changed to uBlue's images. You can basically change distro and DEs without manual reinstall or cleanups.
Universal Blue is Fedora Atomic made usable, and SteamOS but actually supported for more hardware (they have specific images for Nvidia, Framework, ROG Ally, Legion GO, etc). And then you can just layer more stuff in, either locally, or if you're an advanced user in a cloud-native manner via GitHub (I always get a kick how I'm basically using Microsoft infrastructure to build me a distro for my personal use and backups).
Edit: Chris Titus covered it recently - https://youtu.be/wdC_qiFoHN4
NixOS is the new Arch - obviously, new users shouldn't use it, but it offers a lot of power that most distributions just cannot offer any time soon. The ability to define a stable channel as your main channel and then define unstable or specific version (down to the commit) per packages or configs, and they don't conflict. Everything is in a config file, so a NixOS-based 'distro' really can just be people sharing their config file.
It's so powerful I'm using it to sync packages (including Flatpak) between all my machines, including the non-NixOS ones. Again, it wasn't easy to learn at first, but if you've been using Linux for a few years? It's worth looking into at least Nix Home-Manager because it really can do so many things.
Last edited by fenglengshun on 18 April 2024 at 5:58 pm UTC
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