 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today I'm going to be talking about Ubuntu 21.04 Beta. So we're going to take a first look at this thing and see what it's all about. We'll take a look at some of the new features. We'll talk a little bit about a few of the things that are missing. And we'll just take a look and see how it feels. Now, first thing we should say, this is a beta software. It was literally just released today, so we can expect some things not to go right. Hopefully it will at least install. Otherwise, this video will be pointless. But, you know, it's a beta, so we're not going to judge it too harshly. So let's go ahead and jump in, shall we? OK, so I'm here in VirtualBox. I've already got the virtual machine set up. All we've got to do is hit start and see if this will actually go ahead and load. We'll see if we can make a full screen. Ubuntu, we'll see what the load times look like. But usually they're pretty good on Debian based distros like Ubuntu. Probably going to have to scan. Oh, no, usually they do the scan of the disk or the scan of the file or whatever it is. So we're just going to go ahead and install it. We'll run through this process real quick. Make sure the key word is working, which it is. Continue. Normal installation is fine. We're not going to download the updates. We'll do that afterwards. We'll install the third-party stuff, because sometimes you'll get drivers or whatever that you need to continue. Now, this may be the last time we see the ubiquity installer here because they're building a brand new installer made from Flutter. So this may be the last time we actually go through this specific installation process. So erase disk and install Ubuntu, usually the same. Options usually have here. Interestingly enough, they've taken away the warning about ZFS being. Like in the testing phase or whatever. So I wonder if you click this if it tells you, no, we're not going to do ZFS because I'm not sure how that will work in VirtualBox, but maybe someday I'll actually go through and test a different file system other than EXT4, but we'll just leave that the way it is now. And then install now. Continue and. VirtualBox has crapped out. Awesome. OK. Well, we're going to try again. See if we can get out of this, which we cannot. OK. All right. Power off machine. All right. Well, we're going to try that again. Luckily, my key bindings for DWM are still working there. I'm not sure why that does that. Let's go make sure everything's set up right here. Let's go ahead and keep this graphics controller proper like that. We'll make sure that I get the right processor and enough memory. I'm sure I give it enough storage, too. But we're going to go ahead and try again. Here we go. Well, hopefully it won't crap out again. I'm guessing that this is more of a VirtualBox thing than a problem with Ubuntu beta itself. But we'll see. I've had the problem before. Sometimes when you select that alternate graphics driver, you choose the alternate graphics driver to get full screen, because without choosing it, you get this small screen and then you have to go through and install the guest edition. That's a pain in the ass. I'm going to go and install. And then continue. OK, here we go. Continue, install. Now this is where we crapped out before. Definitely slower than it was. We got farther than we did before, which is good. New York's fine. And I see Ubuntu beta continue. It's installing. So we're going to see if this works or not. Definitely looking like that was that weird graphics driver that was having the problems before. So hopefully we'll be able to at least go through. And I suppose I could just install the guest editions like a normal person. OK, the installation was complete. We go ahead and restart now. We'll see if it actually will restart. It may end up having to go through and exiting out of this and then remove the installation media from virtual box. But we'll see. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not. Usually depends on the boot order. Well, it looks like it's going to do it without having to have that removed, which is good. So we'll go ahead and log in here and then we'll see if we can get full screen. The application I bus preferences has closed unexpectedly. So again, beta software, we're going to go ahead and send this because obviously we want to make sure that they can fix these bugs. Let's see if extrander will extrander dash S 1920 by 1080. No, that didn't work out. OK, so we're going to have to install the virtual box guest editions, which in order to do that, we're going to have to get a full screen F devices, insert guest edition CD images, run, get a little tutorial on how to install guest editions. It's not that hard. It's just something that you don't ever want to do because if you don't have to do it, why do it? So that was quick and easy. So now we should be able to open up a terminal and do extrander. Still not available. Did I mistype it or something? No. OK, maybe I have to shut this down to start back up. We'll give it a try. It's long since I've had to use guest editions. Give it a nice restart. There we go. Full screen. Awesome. OK, cool. So we've got the traditional welcome screen here. So we're going to skip this and we'll say, yes, you can send my information because I'm not going to be here for that long location. Services can remain off. I don't need any of the software. And we'll just hit done. OK, so what's new in Ubuntu 2104? What's new Ubuntu? Hey, that's funny. All right, so the first thing we should notice is that, well, see, according to OMG Ubuntu, we're supposed to be getting dark theme by default. But that's apparently not system-wide. That's apparently just up here. Yeah, I'm not getting dark theme by default. So maybe that's something that's still being worked on. I don't know. Or maybe it's just the shell theme that's going to be dark by default. But wasn't that always dark? I don't know Ubuntu enough to actually say that. But let's go look at the settings. Because appearance here, yeah, it's just marked as standard. This is supposedly what it's supposed to look like by default with 21 out of 4. Why it wasn't that case for me, I don't know. Maybe it's just like it's just something that's still working on. Because according to OMG Ubuntu, here's what they say. From invisible changes to one you can't fail to miss, Ubuntu 21 out of 4 now uses dark theme by default. It's only OK, so it's only for the GNOME shell UI, including the top bar menus. But wasn't that already dark? I don't know. I mean, I feel like it was, but I might be wrong. OK, so this GNOME shell is based on 3.38, which is not the newest. Normally, when you get a new Ubuntu, especially if it's not an LTS release, usually what you're going to get is the latest GNOME shell. But this time, GNOME shell is 3.40, or excuse me, it's GNOME 40. They dropped the 3. And Ubuntu has decided not to do that quite yet because of the radical changes. You can check out my video up in the cards above. I've done a video on GNOME 40, so you can check that out and look at the changes that are coming. But for now, this is just your standard GNOME layout with the bar over here and the usual stuff. If you want to get to the workspaces, they're still over here along the side. I'm not going to go through and look at the memory usage and stuff like that. That's not really fair to do on a beta software. So I won't be doing that. So supposedly, another thing that is new is it supposedly has a better desktop icons extension with full drag and drop supports. So you can go through and actually, so if we can go through and see if we can do this, that probably is not the way it means. Maybe with a file. I actually don't even know because, all right, we'll find ourselves a file. And let's say we want to drag it down this folder here. Yeah, we can put that on the, apparently, that wasn't something you could do before. Now, see, I know GNOME removed this functionality, so this is actually a GNOME extension that allows this to happen. So that seems to be progressing fairly well. It still seems a little clunky. I mean, it's like moving it by tiles. That's a little weird, but I mean, at least it's there. It's something that I would never use. I would probably disable that completely because I do not need icons on my desktop, but I mean, I understand a lot of people do that. So at least it is there and it's getting better. So that's the one thing. So a lot of the rest of the improvements appear to be with an updated software. So that's something that you would see quite often with a new Ubuntu. You're gonna get the most recent versions of software. So with Firefox, well, I can never remember where this is. It's always under help, that's right. So with Firefox, we're up to version 87.0, which is, I think that's the most recent version. Let me, I actually can't tell. I was gonna go look at my version of Firefox to tell, but I have things all messed up in my Firefox. I can't actually get to this thing here. I've just disabled it, so that's sad for me, I suppose. We can close that. We also get Thunderbird 78. That's gonna take forever to load and close that. And I'm not even gonna bother trying to find the about thing in Ubuntu or in Thunderbird. We'll just assume that OMG Ubuntu is right, that this is the most recent version of Thunderbird. I'm just gonna put this out there right now. The dark theme for Yaru, good looking, man. This is a good looking theme. I really do like it. I'm gonna actually steal it from my GTK themes, because this is really nice looking. Now, I gotta remember, I didn't spend a lot of time with the last Ubuntu, which is, I think, I think it was the last major Ubuntu. Maybe it was last year's, took 2004, where they switched to Yaru for their first time. Maybe it was even two years ago. I don't even know. Time flies, so we can close this. And the other thing that was major is the LibreOffice moved to version 7.1. I'll also say they do a very good job of making LibreOffice look very good, because a lot of times with the themes for LibreOffice, they only follow the GTK themes, kind of. So sometimes you get the dark background or whatever, and the icons are also dark, and you can't see a damn thing, and it's horrible. Can I? Just, I'm just gonna pause this for just a second and talk about LibreOffice. LibreOffice, I'm begging you, I'm begging the developers, please update your UI, so it doesn't look like it's from the 1990s. This is so old. Just, I mean, you have, literally all you have to do is go up here and, wait a minute, this is different. Yeah, this is a new way of, that's cool. I didn't know that, so all you have to do is that, bam, it looks like word. And people would be so much happier if it looks like Microsoft Word. Or just go to one of the other layouts. It'd be perfectly fine, you know? I don't understand why they continue to be so attached that dated, you know, look and feel. Anyways, we can just go ahead and close this. I can stop bitching about LibreOffice now. Okay, so we are going to be getting some GNOME 40 apps. So we're going to get the system monitor. So if we look for system monitor, maybe, this is the version 40 of this. If we look at for it about system monitor, we'll see a version 40 of system monitor. So this is something that you wouldn't see in normal 3.38. This is actually something that would come with GNOME 40. So that's really cool. And it's a nice little system monitor, too. I like the graphs and stuff. I don't know what the old system monitor looks like, so I can't really compare it. But for a graphical system monitor, it looks good. Another one is the characters map. I don't know if I'm going to actually be able to find this. Yep, right here. So this is basically going to show you all your emojis and stuff. So that if we look here about characters, it's also version 40. So that's really cool. It's not particularly something that I would use because I wouldn't be living in GNOME anyways how we're using Ubuntu, but I'd have Rofi installed and use Rofi emoji, which is what I do. And the other one is disk usage analyzer. So disk usage analyzer, which is basically, this probably uses like DU or something in order to show you a graphical representation of your file or your file system. That's cool. And I believe if we, there's no menu for this system. So we can't go see and see the version 40, but apparently this is new. That's awesome. So we got a new wallpaper, obviously. A few of the things we're missing are new versions of the software center. So we're just still getting the same old, slow ass software center. I mean, this is do, do, do, do. It's going to finally pop up and then it's going to think for a while. This won't happen every time you open up software. It's usually only the first time, but it's still, it leaves a lot to be desired. So this is just the old version 3.38 of the GNOME software. It's a snap so you can expect it to be fairly slow. The other one that we didn't get is Nautilus. So this is the old version of Nautilus. So if we look here about files, this is 3.38.2 stable. And the reason why they wouldn't update this to 40 is because Nautilus, the way GNOME does GNOME, Nautilus and GNOME are so completely tied together, or at least that's the way it used to be, that you really couldn't separate and put in Nautilus 40 and leave the rest of GNOME as 3.38, really wouldn't work. And apparently the to-do app is also the old version. Now why this one here couldn't be GNOME 40? I don't know. And you can even, okay, it's really weird that some GNOME apps have an about page and some of them don't. It's really weird. Anyways, so basically that is all the new stuff. Now you gotta remember with 21.04, we're not really looking at anything that is like huge in terms of user-facing features. Most of the stuff that's new is under the hood. So by default, 21.04 uses Wayland. Now, whether or not that that's the case here, I'm not actually sure. Let's log out and see if we can find out. I'm not actually sure. So if we, yeah, we're actually using Wayland. Now I see, that's the way it really should work is that you shouldn't even notice you're using Wayland. So, yeah, our icons didn't show up there. That's okay though. Again, this is beta software, stuff's gonna go wrong. But apparently Wayland is definitely ready for usage. Now, otherwise Ubuntu probably wouldn't have made this choice. Here's the icons. They decided to show up eventually. So, I mean, I say that they wouldn't have made this choice for Wayland if it wasn't ready, but they have done it before. So in Ubuntu 17.10, they used Wayland by default and they ended up going back to Xorg in the next release. So that's the thing. We'll see if Wayland really is ready for prime time, if it's around in 21.10 and the next LTS too. So apparently also this new Ubuntu has better support for AMD hardware running on Wayland and it uses the 5.11 kernel. So we can actually take a look at that. So we wanna do you, you name dot dash A. There we go. So we got Ubuntu beta using 5.11 generic. So this is the, I think that's pretty much the most recent version of the kernel. There might be like one or two dot releases beyond that, but this is definitely very, very recent. So you're definitely not using anything that's super old like if you were using Debian stable or something. So that's, you know, that's nice to know. So that's the first look at Ubuntu 21.04 beta. Now, like I said, it is beta software. So you could see that there's some things that are not quite there yet, but they still have a month to go through and get through some of those issues. And they're doing a beta testing week. I think it starts now, but where they're encouraging you to go through and install the beta, test it on real hardware and in virtual machines like I just did, and then report bugs. So if you're running it on like a spare laptop or something or in a virtual machine, keep it installed once you've tested it and then reported the bugs, that way you can go through and if somebody contacts you and say, hey, you wanna know can you help us reproduce this, you can. Don't just, you can pave after you see a bug and then you would be no help at all at that point. I think probably what we'll see is that this Sabuntu may be a little bit bugger when it comes out than normal. This is just a guess off the top of my head. And the reason why I say that is because of Wayland, this is their first, I mean, their first real try. I think everybody knew back at 17.10 that Wayland wasn't gonna be by default. I think they just wanted to try it and maybe expose more people to Wayland to get some bug reports generated. This time, they seem like they're actually making a real go at Wayland. So I have a feeling we're probably going to see a few more bugs relating to Wayland than what we'd see if we were still on X-Word. But like I said, that's just off the top of my head. The rest of Ubuntu will probably stay just as stable as it always is, so which is good. Ubuntu is meant to be stable. You don't want to have to go through and have things crash all the time when you're meant to be using your computer. So that's the thing. Anyways, thanks for watching. Make sure to follow us on Twitter at the Linuxcast. You can follow us on Facebook at Linuxcast and you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. And with that in mind, I'd like to take a moment to thank our current patrons, Devon, Zach, Marcus, American Camp. Thanks for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.