Canonical has released version 23.04 of its popular Ubuntu Linux distribution released. This is differentLiterThe OS version will be supported for nine months, after which it is initially important to switch to the latest OS version 23.10, which will be released in October. As an alternative, there are lts releases of Ubuntu, which are released every two years and receive support for up to ten years. The latest version is 22.04.

Of course, to get interesting new features, you need to update to newer versions of Ubuntu. With that in mind, let’s take a look at Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster, which introduces Gnome 44, Linux Kernel 6.2, and its own innovations, such as improved quick settings, notification badges, and a new installer. However, features are also gone, such as out-of-the-box support for Flatpaks in various flavors.

Updated installer, but without ZFS

The new installer 23.04 is built on Flutter and has a new visual design. Functionally the same as in 22.10 Kinetic Kudu, except for one difference: ZFSSupport is no longer available. The only options are ext4, XFS, and Btrfs. In addition to ZFS, ext2, ext3, JFS, fat16, and fat32 are also missing compared to 22.10. Why, it is not entirely clear; Canonical seems to be letting its implementation in Ubuntu gather dust. If you still want to use ZFS, you must install 22.10 Those who still want to use ZFS should install 22.10 and update to 23.04 from there.And update to 23.04 from there, which should be a relatively easy process, although you obviously won’t benefit from the new installer.

Apart from this removed feature, the installer looks nice. Text and interface elements are given a bit more room to breathe, which makes for a calm impression. There’s also an option to enable night mode before the installation starts, to prevent burning eyes before the settings menu is available. Finally, the stabilizer needs to handle better dual bootinstallations by providing more information if another operating system installation is detected.

Notification badges with apps on the dock

Once you exit the installer, many of the changes and additions to Ubuntu are actually part of version 44 of the Gnome desktop, or version 6.2 of the Linux kernel. Modified where necessary to fit nicely in Ubuntu. Canonical didn’t offer a huge amount this time around, which isn’t the case.

However, Canonical does add a small change that might help usability again. For example, the icons on the dock, when you pass a notification to the operating system, you get a small badge with a counter for the number of ready notifications, similar to the way it is done in other operating systems. Application developers don’t have to do anything extra for this; If the app is able to pass a notification to the system, it will get a badge.

Quick Settings: More information at a glance

In the headline, we owe it to Gnome 44: the quick settings menu has been expanded from Gnome 43 and Ubuntu 22.10 even further. Where the old menu had one line for each setting, now it’s two. The second line lists the active Wi-Fi connection, which Bluetooth device is connected, and which performance mode the operating system is in. For example, in 22.10, “Wi-Fi” was replaced by the SSID when there was a connection; Now you see both texts. Bluetooth has also been given a submenu so that a quick connection can be made to devices already connected, which saves a lot of time. It is now possible to open submenus using the keyboard.

Additionally, a section for background apps was added to Quick Settings, which only appeared when these apps were running and only offered the option to close them. Since its release, it has been removed, most likely because it was not working properly yet. Apps from Canonical’s Snap Store didn’t appear in this section, but apps from Flathub did, for example. A test with Discord, for example, showed this to us. Either way, the app showed a “tray icon,” which also offers more options than the Quick Settings panel thanks to the context menu.

Overall, this element of the operating system felt it needed to do the same thing on two fronts, with mixed results. So the reason for the removal does not appear to be a mystery. This information is of course not useful to the user at the moment, but it does give an indication of how to handle background apps in the future.

Flatpak moved away from other Ubuntu flavors, and brought them back with the hardware

As Linux users are already aware, Canonical is betting big on its Snap Store, a platform owned by Canonical itself. It has thousands of applications in its collection, which a novice user can get started with right away. Snap is open source, but it only works with Canonical’s own repo, because the backend software is proprietary. A popular alternative to the Snap Store is FlatHub.

This was the case for some time on Ubuntu Desktop, but now it also applies to other flavors of Ubuntu: if you want Flatpak, you can download it via terminal. Out of the box, there is no trace of it as of 23.04, but Canonical assures that users are completely free to install Flatpak manually. Flatpak offers just that directions.

Opinions about Snaps are divided. Linux Mint developers are strongly against and even against it I decided that Snap would be blocked by default on their distro, though their documentation doesn’t contain steps to undo this block.

Get Steam Snap stable Mesa 23 copy and library exist

Canonical has announced that Steam’s Snap Store variant is coming to stablebranch gold. In addition, it comes with 32-bit libraries, Mesa drivers with version number 23 and task dependencies. Overall, that should make playing the game an evolving experience, the developer said. Canonical states that 150,000 people downloaded the Steam snap beta, which hopefully translates to plenty of feedback and improvements to the package, although it’s hard to verify that there are countless games on the market. If that turns out to be disappointing in practice, the official repo and Flathub are still alternatives.Ubuntu has two new flavors: Ubuntu Cinnamon and Edubuntu.

New one flavours

As of this update, Ubuntu has two new flavors: Ubuntu Cinnamon and Edubuntu. Strictly speaking, the latter is not a new flavor, but one that is back. The last time Edubuntu was present was at the time of version 14.04 Trusty Tahr. At that time, kernel version 3.13 was still in use and Unity was the default desktop environment. Edubuntu is maintained by the same team as Ubuntu Studio and is equipped with tools such as Tux Paint, Inkscape, more serious puzzle games, e-book applications, chemtool, KGeography and much more. Standard tools for setting up student accounts with limited rights are also available. the Edubuntu website It’s still pretty spartan right now, so this flavor will be easier to get to know once you convert it into a virtual machine.

Ubuntu cinnamon It does what the name suggests: deliver Ubuntu with the Cinnamon desktop environment. It is mainly known as Linux Mint desktop. This also, if we’re being strict, isn’t entirely new. It has been an unofficial variant of Ubuntu Desktop since October 2019 and is an official offspring as of Lunar Lobster. The Cinnamon desktop environment provides an experience similar to that of Gnome 2 or Mate. The developers themselves also describe it as “similar to Windows 7”.