Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 2016

The stable Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release is now available to download


Ubuntu 16.04 — New Features
Linux Kernel 4.4
TuxlogoUbuntu 16.04 LTS ships with a modified version of Linux 4.4 kernel.

It introduces numerable improvements to system stability, performance, power efficiency, and file system handling, and introduces support for newer Intel and AMD hardware.

Improved Intel Skylake processor support
3D support in the virtual GPU driver
New driver for Corsair Vengeance K90
Support for TPM 2.0 chips
Journaled RAID 5 support
It also introduces drivers for the Logitech G29 racing wheel and enables support for hardware features on some newer Toshiba laptops.

ZFS
A bigger (and somewhat controversial) change is the addition of support for the Zfs filesystem on Linux — the first version of Ubuntu to support it natively, out of the box.

ZFS is best described as a combination of a volume manager (like LVM) and a filesystem (like ext4, which remains the default for Ubuntu installations).

Ubuntu has produced a reference guide to help those interested in filesystems take advantage of ZFS on Xenial.

Other System Changes
Python 3.5 is default in 16.04. Apps that are based on and/or use Python 2 remain available and will continue work as normal. Developers are advised to upgrade their software to take advantage of Python 3.

As we’ve previously warned, if you use a device with AMD Radeon graphics hardware you should NOT upgrade at present. The fglrx driver is now deprecated in 16.04, and although open source alternatives (radeon and amdgpu) are recommended, they do not deliver comparable performance.