 It's that time of year again. Today is Ubuntu release day, and today marks a very special event because this marks the release of Ubuntu 2204, which of course is a LTS release of Ubuntu, meaning it's a long term support release. The LTS versions of Ubuntu only come out every two years, so this is a big event, and I would say probably more than 90% of Ubuntu desktop users use Ubuntu LTS releases. So I'm very excited today to take a look at the new version 2204 codenamed Jammy Jellyfish. So I have spun up a virtual machine here, and I'm going to go ahead and run through a quick installation of Ubuntu 2204, and the very first screen you get in the installer of course is language, English is the default, and that's okay for me, so I'll click continue. And then English US for the keyboard layout is selected, that is what I use, so I'll click continue. And then update and other software, what apps would you like to install to start with? I want the normal installation, or do I want the minimal installation? The minimal installation will come with a web browser and a few basic system utilities, but it won't come with all the extra goodies like games and office software and stuff like that. I'm going to do the normal installation because I want to see everything that gets installed with the normal installation, and then download updates while installing Ubuntu. I'm going to leave that ticked on, it's ticked on by default. All third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi drivers and a multimedia format, that's going to be your multimedia codecs, you're going to need to turn that on. I know it's ticked off by default, but to have a proper desktop experience you really need to check that box. And then click continue, and then we get to the installation type, it wants to know what we're going to do with the disk. Do we want to erase the entire disk and give the whole disk to Ubuntu, and that's fine in this virtual machine, or do I want to choose something else? Now something else would be important if you needed to manually partition your drives or if you were dual-booting alongside another operating system, maybe you want to go ahead and do the partitioning yourself. In my case, since there's only one virtual hard drive in this virtual machine, I'm going to choose the first option and just let Ubuntu have the whole drive. And then I'm going to click install now. And then we get a summary of the partition scheme that it's going to create. Everything looks good, I'm going to click continue. Then it wants to know about the time zone, it looks like it has correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me, so I'll click continue on that. And then we need to create our username. My username on this computer will be DT, we need to choose a host name for the computer. I'll call this Ubuntu VRT, just so it has a descriptive name in case I ever SSH into this machine, I know exactly which machine I'm actually working on. And then we need to create a strong and complicated password for our DT user. Then we need to confirm that strong and complicated password. And then do we want to log in automatically? No, the reason I created a password is to require my password to log in for privacy reasons, right? You don't want just anybody to be able to get into your computer without a password. So I'm going to leave that, which is the default, require my password to log in. Then we have a box, use active directory. I don't use active directory, I really don't know anything about it. So I'm going to leave that ticked off by default as well. Then I'm going to click continue. And then this portion of the installation usually takes about 10 minutes on my hardware. You can watch the little slideshow here. If you click the arrows, you can read a little bit about Ubuntu, if you don't know too much about it. Other than that, I'll be back in about 10 minutes once the installation has completed. And the installation has completed. That installation took about five or six minutes. Now I could click continue testing if I still want to play around in the live environment here, or I could restart now and actually get into our properly installed Ubuntu 2204. And that's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to choose restart now. I like the new redesigned Ubuntu logo, and that's really nice. So let's go ahead and log in to Genome here. By the way, that's going to be the new Genome 42 desktop. So our user, of course, is DT, and we created a strong and complicated password for DT. And that is interesting. So either I forgot my strong and complicated password, or it's just not going to let me in. I think what the problem here is that I'm in a virtual machine, and let me move my head. If I go down here to the little cog wheel and choose settings, you see you have two choices, Ubuntu and Ubuntu on Xorg. By default, Ubuntu 2204 with the Genome desktop environment is going to use Wayland as a display server. And I bet the Wayland display server is causing me an issue here in this VM. So let me switch over to Xorg and try to log in. And now I get a black screen, but it does let me into the desktop environment. It just takes a second to launch the desktop environment, especially the very first time you log in. Let me go ahead and change the display settings. So on real hardware, that's probably not an issue. Wayland is probably going to be OK for you. But in this VM, the video drivers I have set up for this virtual machine, I guess they just can't handle Wayland all that well. So let me get a proper 1920 by 1080 screen resolution. For those of you wondering about the video driver, I was using in the virtual machine, I was using the VRT IO video driver. So if you're trying this out inside a virtual machine and you're wondering why you can't log into that Wayland session, maybe either use the Xorg session like I did, or maybe change video drivers. I could have tried the QXL video driver or one of the other various video drivers available inside VRT Manager. Now, of course, when you log in the very first time, you get this little welcome screen that will connect your online accounts, your Ubuntu single sign-on account if you have one, your Google account, your NextCloud, your Microsoft account. I don't have any of this stuff while I do have a NextCloud, but I'm not going to sign into it on this video. So I'm going to skip all of this. And the next screen, help improve Ubuntu. Ubuntu can report information that helps developers improve it. So basically, do you want to send reports to Limitry back to Canonical to help them improve Ubuntu? So crash reports, basically. And I typically would leave this ticked on as yes, send system info to Canonical. If for some reason you don't want to do that, you could tick it off and with no here. But I think it's important to actually let developers of software have crash reports because it does help them improve the product. So I'll leave that ticked on. The next screen is privacy. Do we want to allow certain applications to determine our geographical location? It's ticked off by default. I will leave that ticked off by default. I don't want to share any kind of geolocation information with anyone. So you're ready to go. You can use software to install apps like this stuff. So especially a lot of this, some of it's free and open source software, a lot of it's proprietary software that's not typically found in the Debian repositories, the Ubuntu repositories with the app package manager. So some of this stuff like a Spotify and Discord and Slack, these are proprietary applications. I'm assuming they would install via snap packages. If I wanted to install them, I'm going to go ahead and decline that for now. I'm going to click Done. I've got an icon out of place here. This icon was moved when I resized the screen resolution. That's why it's in the center of the screen because we had that really small screen resolution. And then when I blew it up to 1920 by 1080, the icon was out of place. One thing I will say is that might be the best looking Ubuntu wallpaper I've seen in many, many years. That jellyfish, the abstract art jellyfish, is a sexy wallpaper. Now that might be the best Ubuntu wallpaper ever, other than the fact that Ubuntu 804, an LTS from many, many years ago, Ubuntu 804, Hardy Heron had the bird, the Heron, and that was back in the old brown and orange wallpaper days. And that bird looked amazing. If you guys have never seen the Ubuntu Hardy Heron wallpaper, check that out. But this jammy jellyfish is a close second, I think. So let me go ahead and click on the File Manager. One thing to notice about this particular edition of Ubuntu compared to the previous releases is we have a light theme by default. And by light theme, I mean it's actually a really light theme, right? The previous version of the Yaru theme in the last version of Ubuntu I took a look at had a mixed theme, meaning it was a light theme, meaning the window itself was light, but the title bar, this information up here, had a dark bar. And I kind of like the mixed theme, I'll be honest. I like that a little bit better than the all light theme, but either one, I mean, honestly, it looks good either way. Now we can change to a fully dark theme that is available if I go down here to the Applications menu and look for Settings, and I go to Appearance. And now we have two choices, Light and Dark for Style, and if we choose Dark, it will change. And now when I open the File Manager here, you can see now we have this fully dark theme, and that is a sexy dark theme. I mean, really everything about Ubuntu here in the last few releases is a very clean, polished look. This icon set they use is very, very nice. I love the dark Yaru GTK theme as well. And back to the Settings menu, you can change the accent colors. By default, they're using orange. But if I wanted to, I could change the accent colors to green or blue or whatever. If I want to change icon sets and wallpapers to blue or green, I can change the accents to match that as well. But because we're using purplish icons and actually the icons, I just noticed that the icons, they have accent colors. Well, I'm assuming it's an entirely different icon set based on each color when I choose. I'm not exactly sure how they're accomplishing all of that. But that is really slick. This pink Aubergine color here. Yeah, that is, that's not bad. Like I am really impressed with how well themed this version of Ubuntu is. This again, it may be one of the best looking Ubuntu's that I've seen in many years. Taking a look at the top panel here, the top bar of the GNOME shell. We have our activities overview here in the center. Of course, we have our calendar and notifications. And some of this has been tweaked a little bit. I was reading the release announcement and the GNOME team has made a lot of this stuff a little bit more compact, a little smaller because I remember this calendar used to be quite a bit bigger. When you would click on the calendar, it would take up like two thirds of the screen, right? Then they've made it slightly smaller. I believe they've also made some of the system tray widgets over here, slightly smaller as well. And in the power off session menu here, if I go to power off, we actually have a restore option now, which has not been a thing for very long. So for many years, I don't know why this was the case. GNOME, for whatever reason, refused to put a restart option in the menu here. Even though that's one of the most common things that Linux users do, especially Linux users that tweak their system a lot, many times you'll change something on your system that requires a restart. And before what you would have to do is you would have to go into the menu system, hit the power off log out menu and log out to get back into the login manager where you typically sign in. And in the login manager, you had an option to restart. But why not just put that button there? You know, why make me jump through a couple of hoops to restart the system? Another thing that was annoying to many users for a long time was not having the ability to put icons on the desktop. Now Ubuntu had tweaked this for a while. Now they've had the ability to actually put icons on the GNOME desktop, but for a while you could not actually drag and drop icons from the file manager. For example, let me get into the Nautilus file manager if I wanted to put something on the desktop, maybe the downloads folder, maybe drag that there. Now that actually works. That was not a thing before Ubuntu 22.04. Now I don't actually want my, if I go into the desktop folder, you'll see I actually moved downloads to desktop because that's what this is representing here. I actually do not want the desktop folder in that. These are clickable by the way. So now this path is fully clickable. Yeah, let me move that back. And you see when I do a copy and paste here, so I cut downloads from the desktop directory and pasted it back in the home directory. And you can see that was represented here on the desktop as well. It took it off the desktop. One of the more controversial things about this release of Ubuntu is Firefox is a snap package. So let me click Firefox. That actually launched rather quickly here. And let me make that full screen. So the speed wasn't too bad, which I don't think I had a problem with the speed last time. Last time I tried Firefox as a snap, it was just a buggy. There were things that broke. I can't remember what the problem was on the last Ubuntu release, but I had serious issues with that version of Firefox as a snap. But I don't think the speed was the issue and because everything did launch correctly. I go through the menu system, everything. Everything looks like it's functioning. I add a new tab. It all looks like it's working. Of course, a lot of those bugs from the last release of Ubuntu have probably been worked out by now because that's the point of the interim releases those are really kind of like beta tests for the LTS release. So I'm assuming they've got all the kinks worked out of the Firefox as a snap. Now, if you didn't want Firefox as a snap, one of the, again, controversial things about this is I can't open a terminal and do a sudo apt install Firefox because there's no Debian package available for Firefox through the apt package manager in Ubuntu. So if you didn't want the snap version of Firefox, you would have to go manually grab a Debian package from Mozilla. I'm assuming they offer one. I'm sure they do. They offer packages for many different package managers out there. Or if you prefer, you could try Firefox as a flat pack. You could try Firefox as an app image. For me, though, as long as the snap package works, I would just keep using the snap package plus the snap pack auto updates, which is important for a web browser because for security reasons, you want your web browser to always be up to date. And you don't have to worry about that with snaps because they auto update. Now, let me get back into the settings menu. So let me open the out launcher, go to settings or just type settings here. And let me get back into appearance here. We have desktop icons. Of course, I could turn the desktop icons off. I have mentioned on previous videos, I typically just turn the desktop icons off. I don't need to see them. We have various doc settings. And some of these were here in previous releases. Some of these weren't. We have the auto hide the doc, which is turned off by default, but I don't mind it auto hiding. But I'll leave it turned off for now. We have panel mode, which I don't believe was here before. Panel mode is turned on, meaning take up the entire length of the screen here. So if it's on the side, take up the entire height of the screen. But if I turn that off, now it becomes more of a doc like your traditional GNOME dash to doc extension. So that could be cool for some people that prefer the doc look. I actually prefer the panel look because if you have something full screen, it looks kind of weird to have these gaps here. Nothing's really gonna go in those gaps anyway. So just for aesthetic reasons, I would probably just keep that full screen. Now I don't need a 48 pixel size icon. I would drastically reduce that to something like about 30 pixels, especially if I add a whole bunch of stuff to my panel. Now we could also change the orientation or the position on the screen right now. It's to the left, which honestly makes a lot of sense. But if you prefer, you could put it on the bottom. Now I don't like doing bottom panels and bottom docs because honestly, all of your buttons and your controls for your windows, all the programs you use, everything happens at the top and typically the top left. This is where your mouse is all the time. So it doesn't make sense for most of your stuff to be doing stuff with the mouse up here and then having to come down here and click. And then go back to the top where everything else is happening. And then come back down here. You know, it's just a lot of mouse travel. It's, it will cause you some wrist pain if you use your mouse all the time. So actually for, it's not just for aesthetics that Canonical and the Ubuntu team puts that dock on the left and the top left. It's just because that makes a lot of sense. You're already right here anyway. So your mouse barely has to travel. Like if you have a full screen web browser, your back buttons and the URL bar and all that's right here. And then your dock is right here, right? Don't put that at the bottom. Now there, you could also put it on the right. I have no idea why anyone would ever put a dock on the right side of the screen. Let me go ahead and take a look at the applications that are installed out of the box here on Ubuntu, just quickly taking a look through the app launcher here. We have our additional drivers tool. That's to get your proprietary drivers, especially your proprietary wifi drivers, proprietary video drivers. That's very important. You have All Riot Solitaire. That's a game, of course. We have our calendar application language support. LeanBerry Office is here. We have videos. And so that's our GNOME video player. Now that is interesting. They're not alphabetically sorted here, which I thought they were alphabetically sorted in previous versions. Oh, we can move them now. Now this was not a thing in previous versions of GNOME and previous versions of Ubuntu. So we can actually move these launchers around. That's very nice, because honestly, you probably want to put the launchers for the programs you use all the time toward the top of this menu. And maybe like on the second screen, move everything that you don't really use. And the second screen, yeah, I kind of animations are rather quick and peppy. Yeah, this looks good. We have our text editor, which of course is gEdit. Although I don't think they call it gEdit anymore. It's gEdit41.0, but the GNOME team, typically just label things text editor. Now that's why in the menu system, all you get is text editor, rather than the name of the actual program. By the way, the text editor gEdit41.0. You'll notice a mix of things here, because Ubuntu LTS, there will be some older versions of some programs. So it's GNOME 42, but not all of the GNOME suite of applications, not all of those particular programs will be on version 42. You'll see some 41s, and you may see some older stuff as well. We have the GNOME terminal here. Let's open the terminal, because we should check some stuff out. The very first thing we should check out is the kernel version. So we're gonna be on 5.15. That's very important. So if you install this, the LTS release of Ubuntu, you're not gonna get any kernel upgrades, right? So you will occasionally get security updates, a patched version of 5.15, but you will run the 5.15 series of the kernel for the next two or four years. However long you run the Ubuntu LTS, I believe the LTS versions of Ubuntu now are supported for five years. Actually, I think for some cases they have now extended the LTS support life for up to 10 years, I think for enterprise customers. That's probably much longer than most people will wanna run a LTS release. What I recommend is since the new LTS comes out every two years, April, every two years, run 2204 until April of 2024 and then upgrade to 2404, the next LTS and yada, yada, yada. So just plan on upgrading every two years. And of course, Ubuntu makes upgrading very easy. There's an upgrade tool. It'll pop up every two years, letting you know, hey, we're on a new LTS. Do you wanna upgrade? And then of course, just take the upgrade path. Now let's see how many applications are actually installed on the systems. So I'm gonna do a apt list dash dash installed. And it spits out every application that is installed line by line. And of course, these are packages that are installed with the apt package manager. Now if I take that, because every package is its own separate line, I could take that information and pipe that into WC-L. WC is the word count program. Dash L means give me a line count. So there were 1,704 lines in that output, meaning there were 1,704 packages installed on the system. Now, of course, those are packages installed with the apt package manager. What was installed as a snap? Let's do a snap list. So it looks like there are some snaps installed. So let me decrease the font size just so we can see what is installed here. And it looks like we don't really have much installed as a snap by default. I mean, we have some of the basic stuff. I mean, we have the snap de-dammon, of course. We have the core snap. We have the GNOME libraries that are needed and the core GTK themes. But really the only packages that are installed as a snap are Firefox and the Snap Store as a snap. So that people that complain that Ubuntu is forcing snaps on people really, they're really forcing Firefox on you. And that's not even Ubuntu that is making that Firefox decision. Many people are confused about this. The Ubuntu team did not take Firefox and make it a snap and take away the dead pack. That was Mozilla's decision. That was Firefox's decision. They wanted to just package it as a snap because it's auto updating and it provides them an easy way to just package it one time for Ubuntu. So again, don't throw shade on Canonical or the Ubuntu team for the Firefox decision. Again, that really wasn't their decision. That's Mozilla's decision. If you wanna complain to somebody about it, go tell the Mozilla team about it. One of the new things with this edition of Ubuntu is you will have a new screenshot application. I'm assuming that's from the GNOME upstream. If I do screenshot, yeah, take a screenshot. Yeah, you see this new GNOME screenshot utility. It's almost like Flameshot, right? With the way you can just select a region and take a selection or you can just take a picture of the whole screen or you can do a specific application so it's very Flameshot-like. I was fine with the previous version of the GNOME screenshot utility. It was rather simple, but I mean, most people just need a simple utility, but that's fine too. I actually don't mind them improving the screenshot tool a little bit. I do think Flameshot has definitely up the game as far as screenshot utilities. So I think a lot of the other screenshot applications like GNOME's screenshot tool and KDE's Spectacle and things like that, I think a lot of those applications do have a little catching up to do. One other thing that I read in the release announcements is let me open up the file manager here. I'm gonna right-click and I was gonna create a new document and I no longer right-click and create a new file. Maybe I have to go in the menu system. Oh, where do I? Oh, that just rearranges that stuff. How do I create a new document? I can create a new folder, but am I just missing something here? What are we doing? Maybe it's one of these. That is, that's a new window. What is this, a new tab? Yeah, new tab and this is a new folder. Am I just a complete idiot or maybe when did they take away the ability to actually just create an empty file here in Nautilus? I'm perplexed here. I'm sure this isn't a move-to decision here. This is Nautilus, why can't I right-click and create a new plain text file or at least do it from the menu? What I was gonna do is now you can actually zip and unzip from inside Nautilus, which is like a basic feature every file manager should have, but for whatever reason, Nautilus didn't have it. Let me control Alt-T. Since I can't actually create a file from the file manager, let me actually just create one here in the terminal. So I'm gonna do touch and I'm gonna do file1.txt and then I'm gonna touch file2.txt. That's just a better file manager, the terminal anyway, especially compared to Nautilus, but now if I select these, right-click on them. Now I have the option to compress and we have compression options, including zip and well, looks like the hints are cut off. That could be a VM problem, but I can actually create an archive now and there I just zipped it and if I right-click on it and extract here, you know, I'd get the files again. Actually I'd get a folder with the files in them. Back to home here. Yeah, I'm just really perplexed why I couldn't, why I had to go to the terminal to touch a new file instead of, I don't understand what GNOME is doing with their file manager. One last thing I wanna check out, let me go back to settings because the most important part of every Ubuntu release, especially the LTS releases, is the wallpaper pack. And honestly, the default wallpaper, this jammy jellyfish wallpaper is amazing. I wouldn't change it, but let's check out the others. Yeah, that's okay, it's a little minimal. And then of course you got your standard nature photography, the flower actually is really nice. That is a little garish and bright for me, more flowers. This picture here of this path through a field, actually that's a really nice wallpaper. I may have to borrow some of these wallpapers. Even though I'm not running Ubuntu, I may have to borrow their wallpaper pack. What is this here? There's some lines, very minimal though, very dark. That would look great with the light theme. This wallpaper, if I went to appearance, chose the light theme. A light theme against a dark wallpaper would look very nice, but the problem is the light theme and the dark theme. When I changed the light theme, the wallpaper changed back. Why? It's because when we were using the light theme before, we were using the jammy jellyfish wallpaper. So each light and dark mode, they have their own settings and it remembers the settings. So it remembers the background I chose for this. So I have to actually choose this or the light mode with the dark wallpaper. Now, if I go back to appearance and choose dark mode, we'll still be using this wallpaper, but I could change it. But if I go back to the light mode, it will always go back to the last wallpaper I was using with the light mode. Now, I actually think that's really neat because most of the time, the wallpapers you use with a light theme and a dark theme will be completely different. Typically, you want dark wallpapers with light themes and light wallpapers with dark themes. So I actually think that is a rather nice touch and that is thankfully a part of, I think, what the GNOME team is doing. And I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm gonna go back to the default wallpaper. And so, yeah, Ubuntu 2204, I'm really, really impressed with this. Like, I'm really blown away by, first of all, how much improvement GNOME has seen with GNOME 42, and I'm really impressed with some of the stuff that the Ubuntu team added on top of GNOME. That GTK theme, the light theme and the dark theme, that Yoru theme looks gorgeous. The icon set, changing the accent colors, how it affects the GTK theme and the icon set. That's really, really nice. That's Chef's Kiss stuff right there. Overall, I think this is a solid release. I think this is gonna be a big hit for Ubuntu. And I wanna congratulate all the developers for Ubuntu and for the GNOME team as well for all their hard work. I am, again, I was really genuinely impressed with what I saw today. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I needed to thank the producers of this episode. Devon Gabe James, Maxim, Matt Michael, Mitchell Paul Scott, Wes Allen, Armored Dragon, Chuck Commander, Ingrid, Yilkai, Dylan George Lee, Lennox Ninja, Mike Erion, Alexander, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Polytech, Riala Teetz-Fertilets, Red Prophet, Steven and Willie, these guys. They're my highest-eared patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Ubuntu 2204 Jammy Jellyfish. It wouldn't have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon. I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work and wanna see more videos about Linux and free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys. Peace. This might be the best Ubuntu since 14.04.