Ubuntu 16.04 Linux Debuts With Support Until 2021

The latest long-term support release of one of the most popular Linux distributions brings new package management, container and file system capabilities.

The Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus operating system is a long-term support release, with both desktop and server editions benefiting from five years of support. Canonical releases new LTS milestones every two years.

Part of Canonical’s overall release cadence is designed to align with the OpenStack release cycle, which produces new milestones every six months. For Ubuntu 16.04, the OpenStack Mitaka update, released April 7 by the OpenStack Foundation, is included.

With Ubuntu 16.04, Canonical is providing its users with the option of running the ZFS (zettabyte file system) that was originally developed by Sun Microsystems for use on Solaris Unix. An open-source port of ZFS, known as OpenZFS, enables the file system to run on Linux, providing users with a high-performance technology for handling large file system needs.

Ubuntu 16.04 supports Docker containers in multiple ways that help improve performance, security and scalability. With LXD, which is a container hypervisor virtualization approach, Ubuntu is providing a secure system daemon for LXC (Linux containers).

While there are other desktop environments that a user can run with Ubuntu 16.04, the default remains the Unity desktop.

The Snappy packaging system provides a transactional updating system that enables applications to be updated quicker than with a traditional application package.

Snappy applications or “Snaps” can be easily built and deployed with Ubuntu’s Snapcraft tool.

At the foundation of the Ubuntu 16.04 operating system is a Linux 4.4 kernel. The Linux 4.4 kernel was the first released by Linux founder Linus Torvalds this year.