Welcome Groovy Gorilla

Introduction

This past Thursday Ubuntu released their new version Ubuntu Linux 20.10 (as in October, 2020) which has the code name Groovy Gorilla. Canonical releases a new version every six months and this is the latest, to a user this release is pretty similar to the previous 20.04 release, but there are a few notable upgrades under the covers. In this article let’s look at some of the highlights. A lot of other Linux versions, such as Linux Mint are based on Ubuntu Linux, so we’ll be seeing upgrades to these over the next few weeks, as they incorporate this version as their base.

New Linux Kernel 5.8

My personal complaint against Ubuntu Linux is that they quickly get behind on the Linux kernel. Ubuntu Linux 20.04 was built around the Linux kernel 5.4, which is now rather old (at least in Internet time). Groovy Gorilla jumps ahead to the much newer Linux kernel 5.8. The newest released Linux kernel is 5.9, so we are now only one version behind (at least until 5.10 drops). Canonical is very conservative in adopting newer Linux kernels preferring the devil they know over dealing with possible rough edges in the newest version. The big downside is that they have to back port all security updates back to this older version and that is a lot of work and sometimes leads to problems. This also means Ubuntu users don’t have the newest features of the kernel, but the only place this has really affected Ubuntu is in their Raspberry Pi and ARM support, where there have been lots of improvements in the newer kernels, plus a few applications that utilize newer kernel features or work better with newer kernel optimizations.

Although you can build a newer Linux kernel yourself to run, it is rather a long process and most people don’t attempt this.

The places a user might notice the new kernel is if they are running a newer processor, especially an AMD processor where there is a lot of new support for better performance. Also there are quite a few improvements in USB and thunderbolt support.

Not a Long Term Support Release

Ubuntu releases what they call a long term support version every two years, the most recent is April’s 20.04 release. 95% of Ubuntu users stick to the LTS version and only upgrade every 2 years. The LTS version is supported for five years and undergoes extra testing to ensure enterprise stability and quality. This 20.10 version is not an LTS version which means it will be supported for 9 months. I’m a developer and prefer the latest version and I’m not sure I want to stick with the Linux kernel 5.4 all the way to 22.04.

I haven’t had any problems with the intermediate versions, but, I’m quite willing to solve any problems I might run into. Further I always install into a virtual machine first and ensure the usual things I use all work before installing it natively on one of my computers that I regularly use.

Raspberry Pi Fully Supported Right at Release

Ubuntu has been supporting various ARM based single board computers for a while now. For instance my nVidia Jetson Nano came with the last LTS Ubuntu Linux 18.04. They had most of their versions available for the Raspberry Pi 3, but when the Raspberry Pi 4 came out, Ubuntu was quite slow to provide native versions. As a result I use Kali Linux on my Raspberry Pi 4 which is excellent and came out shortly after the Raspberry Pi 4. With this 20.10 release Ubuntu is fixing this problem providing all the Raspberry Pi versions at release. Raspberry Pi 4’s with 4 or 8 Gig of RAM are excellent at running full 64-bit versions of Linux including Ubuntu. You can run the full desktop and can run any applications you like. It used to be that you needed to run the so-called “Lite” desktops rather than the full Gnome desktop, but this is no longer the case. They have both server and desktop versions as well as 32 or 64-bit versions.

Lots of Other Updates

Of course, this new release updates all the various components and applications that are bundled with the core Linux including the Gnome desktop, LibreOffice and Python. Most of these you could install the newest version yourself over any version of Ubuntu, but almost no-one bothers and just use the version that the Ubuntu package manager provides. I didn’t find anything jarringly different, everything was quite familiar and although there are minor tweaks, I could happily keep working without searching for anything. Certainly a nicer experience than Microsoft’s sometimes jarring 6 month updates to Windows 10 (I dread installing the new Fall release).

Enterprise users might like that connecting to Active Directory is now part of the main install program and that the ZFS file system is not labelled as experimental anymore.

Summary

Groovy Gorilla is quite a nice release, it brings all the components of this Linux distribution up-to-date and from the few days I’ve been using it, it appears stable. I like that they are now on version 5.8 of the Linux kernel and I like that they have released all their versions for the Raspberry Pi at the same time as for Intel/AMD based computers.