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Canonical To Release Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS 'Xenial Xerus' Tomorrow (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical announced today that it will be releasing Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on Thursday, April 21. The sixth major release of Ubuntu Long-Term Support (LTS) features the new 'snap' package format and LXD pure-container hypervisor. "The addition of 'snaps' for faster and simpler updates, and the LXD container hypervisor for ultra-fast and ultra-dense cloud computing demonstrate a commitment to customer needs that sets Ubuntu apart as the platform for innovation and scale," said Dustin Kirkland who leads platform strategy at Canonical. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS introduces a new application format, the 'snap', which can be installed alongside traditional deb packages. The snap format is much easier to secure and much easier to produce, and offers operational benefits for organizations managing many Ubuntu devices, which will bring more robust updates and more secure applications across all form factors from phone to cloud.
Based on experience, Ubuntu will be released at the last possible moment on April 21st for the last people on Earth (Literally!) to still be in April 21st. It'll be available for most people on the 22nd I'm sure.
Its quite good and I say that as an Arch user.
Snap is basically sandboxed apps the way Mac OS and now Windows is doing. It greatly simplifies deployment and dependancies. It also creates a number of issues but you should google it for more info.
Unity is greatly improved and very stable. The biggest change to me is the use of the GNOME software center instead of their own. I experienced a number of bugs with it and I'm not sure I care for it over the commandline yet. But for those who care, it's there.
It's an LTS tho so people who prefer LTS should jump on this as it will have the newest packages fit for an LTS (in Ubuntu's standards of LTS which differe from that of Debian).
The way it was described to me is this: it makes Ubuntu/linux more approachable for developers. It solves the problem of dependency/PPA hell. No more needing PPAs to get current versions of applications! No more breaking one application because a dependent library was replaced with an incompatible version when you installed a different application!
Scroll down for the release notes on
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xenial...
I've skimmed over it, and truthfully, I don't see major changes for my use case (normal desktop user of Kubuntu).
Plasma 5.5 is the default in kubuntu 16.04. If you're on KDE4 now you'll notice quite a big difference (for the better , IMO).
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/ku...
An AC said: "Which could get Canonical into hot water with the GPL."
Whether or not this is a licence violation depends on Linus Torvalds and The Linux Foundation. They are the ones that set the terms for how Linux is licensed. Under U.S. law at least, it's the copyright owner's intent that matters, and not some third party interpretation interpretation of the licence text.
Torvalds has previously stated that a kernel module can't violate the kernel licence agreement unless it is a derivative work of the kernel (and the module licence violates the GPL). At the very least, it needs to have been designed with knowledge of the Linux internals. Since ZFS was developed independent of Linux, it seems unlikely that The Linux Foundation will be suing Canonical.
If you want to thoroughly understand the issues, you could read Eben Moglen's opinion (he's the lawyer behind the GPL 3): https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2016/linux-kernel-cddl.html
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.