Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Released – What’s New; Download Now

It’s April 2018 and the much awaited Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver with Long Term Support (LTS) is here! Earlier we saw the improvements in Ubuntu 18.04 beta release. With today’s stable release it’s another milestone in Ubuntu’s journey as one of the most popular operating systems in the world. Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver released on 26th April 2018 as they promised in their release schedule. Let’s take a look at what’s new in the Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver stable release.

Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Released – What’s New

As you may already know, the most significant change in Ubuntu 18.04 is the replacement of Unity user interface with the GNOME desktop environment (In case you missed the news, you can read the official announcement by Mark Shuttleworth here). Even though the Ubuntu team has really done their best in order to give GNOME the same look and feel of the Unity desktop. This greatly helps the existing Unity users to make the switch less annoying. As a Ubuntu user one of the main visual change you can find is that the position of window control buttons have now been moved to right. This is obiously due to the shift from Unity to GNOME. Another visual change is with the Nautilus file manager, with a stylish new dark sidebar on the left side integrated with icons, which we already featured in our previous post.

As part of the switch to GNOME DE, the LightDM login manager got replaced with GNOME’s GDM display manager. It uses virtual terminal 7 by default instead of virtual terminal 1. The System Log app also got replaced in Ubuntu 18.04, it now uses GNOME Logs by default. Another GNOME related change is that gconf got replaced by gsettings. Most of the inbuilt GNOME apps in Ubuntu 18.04 received major UI redesigns. GNOME Calendar now comes with a Week View and supports recurring events.

Here’s a list of other notable changes you can find in Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver Final Release:

• Introduced Canonical Livepatch in order to apply some kernel updates without having to restart (You will need to have an Ubuntu Single Sign-On account for this).
• All new installations now uses a swap file by default instead of swap partition.
• Encrypted Home option is no longer availbale in the graphical installer (Ah, that’s sad!).
• Usage data collected by default unless you opt-out.
• Linux kernel upgraded to version 4.15 with additional support for Linux security module stacking and more.
• Libre Office upgraded to version 6 (Find out what’s new).
• The default DNS resolver is now systemd-resolved.
• ifupdown is no longer installed by default.
• Python 2 got replaced by Python 3.
• GPG binary is now provided by GnuPG2.
• Driverless printing support.
• libinput is now the default driver for mouse and touchpad devices.

Download Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver (LTS)

You can now download the final release of Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver (LTS) from the official website of Ubuntu. Please note that Canonical dropped support for 32-bit architecture and hence there is no 32-bit version of Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver available for download. If you are a 32-bit user, especially LTS, it is recommended to do a fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver 64-bit version.