 Every April and October Ubuntu graces us with a brand new release and this year is no different. So today we're going to be taking a look at Ubuntu 21.0 for her sweet hippo. I don't know if I pronounced that right. Probably not. I'm not going to try again. It's a dumb name. Let's just move past it. Today, we're going to take a look at a few of the brand new features in it. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about what it's actually like to use on hardware. Now I've used it on my laptop for about two months in its beta form. So I have a few thoughts on it. So let's go ahead and jump in. So this is a Ubuntu 21.04 in the live environment. Now the reason why it's in the live environment is because I could not get it to install in the virtual machine. I'm assuming this is because VirtualBox hasn't been updated for 21.04 yet, but that's just an assumption in my part. I have noticed that on the live environment, it's a little buggy. I've had a couple crashes. And again, I'm assuming this has to do with the nature of a virtual machine. I didn't have that many bugs on my laptop. So I must, like I said, I'm assuming it's the VM that's having a problem, not the release of Ubuntu. Now, the first thing you'll notice, or maybe not notice, is that Ubuntu 21.04 uses Weyland by default. And basically, that four people who are eligible to use it basically meaning people who use AMD GPUs. And I believe Intel GPUs as well, but you'll log into Ubuntu just like you normally do and you probably won't notice the fact that you're using a different display server. And that's the way it should be. Now, how this will work with gaming, I'm not sure I haven't been able to test that part out. But supposedly, Weyland is much better with gaming than it used to be. So I guess that's just something we'll have to see as this kind of plays out. Ubuntu has tried to go to Weyland before back in 2017, I believe, and it did not work out. So we'll see if this actually sticks around for the next release and the LTS after. So that will tell us whether or not Weyland is ready for prime time. Chances are if you are using Weyland, you won't notice any difference. If you do have a problem with Weyland, you can go into the Xorg session and that's just really easy. You just change your session in the login screen and you just use Xorg just like normal. Now the one thing you'll notice that is not here is GNOME 40. And you can see that by the fact that the workspaces are still on the top, the side here instead of at the bottom and there's no fancy multitasking view. And that was decided because GNOME 40 has this fairly radical change in user experience and Ubuntu is just not ready to implement any of that stuff yet. So we'll have to see in the next release how much of that stuff comes to Ubuntu. For now, what you're seeing is GNOME 3.38. And most of the applications you'll see have also been updated to GNOME 3.38. There's a few GNOME 40 apps thrown in the system monitor, whether I believe in the to do app or all GNOME 40 apps. And so but the rest of them are all GNOME 3.38, the Nautilus and stuff are all GNOME 3.38. Another thing you'll notice is by default Ubuntu is using a dark GNOME shell theme. So this here used to be white. I don't really remember that being the case, but apparently it was. Now, as you can see, they're not using a full on dark theme that's still available. You can change it in the settings. But otherwise, everything else is going to be this odd two toned color. So that's a design choice. I probably wouldn't have made myself because I prefer the dark theme. But that's just, you know, something that they've chosen to do now. Along the side here in Nautilus, supposedly there are some redesigned icons here as well. And there are other icons in Ubuntu 21 out of four that have also been updated. A few of the Yaru themed icons have been tweaked just a little bit. And then there are a few application icons as well that have been changed. I believe the characters is one of them. I think weather is another and I can't remember what the third one is. Another thing you'll notice or again, maybe not notice is that by default, at least when you're running on hardware, the icons for your folders and stuff will show up on the left hand side. And any connected like disk drives will appear on the right hand side. Now, I don't have any disk drives actually attached to this VM. So there's nothing over there now. But like I said, that is something that now happens by default. And they've also been able to drag and drop to the desktop. So you can actually drag folders from Nautilus to the desktop and they'll go there. And you can drag things into, you know, into that folder as well if you wanted to. That's a feature that they're actually re-applementing with an extension because GNOME itself has actually taken icons on the desktop out of GNOME completely. So this is an extension that Ubuntu has been working on now for a couple of years and the drag and drop functionality is finally there. And this is something that people have been asking about for quite a while. Now, if you're on a laptop, Ubuntu 21.4 does have a few new power mode settings that will allow you to go through and manage your battery life slash performance of your computer. Now, one thing I have noticed on my computer or on my laptop is that when you change the power mode, it doesn't persist between reboots. So you'll have to change that every time you reboot. I'm hoping that's something that they change in a future release or maybe they've changed it in the final release because I don't have the final release on my laptop yet. So maybe it's there, but I'm not sure. Now, Ubuntu 21.4 uses the Linux 5.11 kernel, which is almost the most recent. And it's definitely more recent than what you'll find on previous releases. And the only change they've made to the installer of Ubuntu 21.4 is that now if you encrypt your install, you'll be able to create a recovery key, which will help if your system goes, you know, belly up and you have to recover in an image. And finally, Ubuntu 21.4 comes with updated versions of Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice. And like I said, there are a few GNOME 40 apps also included like the system monitor. And we can actually go ahead and look at that if we can find it here. As you can see, this says version 40. And what this looked like before, I'm not exactly sure. So I can't really tell you what changes are here, but this is one of the few GNOME 40 apps that have made it into 21.04. So that's all there is in terms of new features. Now, Wayland, like I said, is by far the biggest change in 21.04. And if you're using it, you're basically beta testing its use in Ubuntu because there's a good chance that if it's really buggy and it can't be fixed between now and say next April, they might go back to X or it's happened before. So I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen again. Personally, I do think that Wayland is much closer to being ready to prime time than it was before, but I'm not sure where it is on gaming. And gaming is a huge deal for a lot of people. So I'm not sure where that's at yet. So that's something that's going to be really interesting to see over the next few months. Because once Ubuntu 21.04 gets in the hands of millions of people and a lot of people are using Wayland, we're going to start to see the sharp edges come out. And hopefully those things will be things that we'll be able to see get fixed. But again, it's just going to be a waiting game to see how it does. In terms of actual use, it's a very good Ubuntu release. The user facing features are nothing to write home about. So that's, you know, it's not... If you're looking forward to upgrading just because it has a whole bunch of shiny new features, you're not going to find that here. At least in terms of graphical changes to the interface, those just don't really exist. There are a few like minor tweaks, like I said, the icons and the change to the dark theme for the shell. But outside of those, really, this is very much a iterative release. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. They've spent a lot of time going through and rooting out a lot of bugs and stuff over the last few months. And they've spent a lot of time trying to get Wayland to come forth and be ready for, you know, prime time. And I think that that was obviously a lot of work. So I'm not surprised that, you know, we don't have a huge brand new feature or whatever to grace this release with. So I'm not an Ubuntu guy. So I'm always been much more of an arched guy. So I tend to be a lot more critical of Ubuntu releases than other people, but this is a good Ubuntu release. I've had a lot of success with running the beta on my laptop. I've had very few bugs. Matter of fact, I've had more bugs on this VM than I've had on my laptop in the last two months. And that's a beta software. So I think it's safe to assume that Ubuntu 21.4 will be just as stable as all the rest of the Ubuntu as they come out. The only thing I'd be a little bit worried about is the stability of Wayland. But again, you have XOR to back up on if you start having Wayland problems. So overall, I'd say if you're one of the Ubuntu users that are always going from interim release to interim release, go ahead and update because there's no reason not to. If you're on the LTS, there's no reason to switch to this. Just wait for the next LTS, because that's probably what you were going to do anyways. There's nothing here that's going to change your mind about leaving the LTS behind because there's no really brand new features here that you just have to try. Now, there's a caveat to that. If you're in enterprise or something or your company uses Ubuntu for desktop computing and you want to give Wayland a try to see how it works on your company's hardware, maybe one computer just to give it a try to see what is coming for you. Because chances are Wayland's here to stick around. But I don't think that that's a use case that is going to affect many people who use the LTS because most people who use the LTS are just going to jump from LTS to LTS to LTS. So that's Ubuntu 21.04. There wasn't a lot here. And like I said, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So thank you for watching. Make sure you follow us on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can also follow us on Facebook at the Linuxcast and you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. 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