What’s new in 21.04?
It may not be packed full of eye-catching new features, but Ubuntu 21.04 features plenty of improvements.
WAYLAND MAY BE DOMINATING the headlines, but it’s by no means the only new feature that’s arrived in Ubuntu 21.04. Several other features are linked to Wayland, of course—the PipeWire project for one, with its aim of “greatly improving handling of audio and video under Linux”. It’s basically a replacement for pulseaudio and JACK, designed to work with containerized Flatpak applications, but also tying in neatly with Wayland’s tighter security requirements.
In practical terms, its primary function is to restore the ability to both screen-share and record your desktop with compatible applications such as OBS Studio and Discord. It will also improve audio support in sandboxed applications, such as those installed through Flatpak.
One interesting choice made in Ubuntu 21.04 is the one to stick with GNOME 3.38 (or more precisely, 3.38.5). This means that the desktop remains a familiar one, despite the recent release of GNOME 40. As a result, no radical desktop changes, such as the controversial switch to dynamic horizontal workspaces, have been implemented this time, although selected GNOME applications, including System Monitor, have been updated to their GNOME 40 versions behind the scenes.
There are some subtle changes to the desktop’s appearance, such as a shift to using the Dark Theme by default for UI elements on the menu bar, including status menus and the Calendar tool. In addition, look out for some small, but pleasing, updates to the Nautilus File Manager, including icon redesigns that incorporate rounded corners.
DESKTOP IMPROVEMENTS
One major change that should make life a lot simpler is the incorporation of a new desktop extension that finally handles drag-and-drop interactions between desktop and applications (such as via the file manager) properly. Take a trip to Settings>Power where you should find that you can now configure power profiles from the friendly GUI—assuming your configuration has proper kernel support. Simply switch between ‘balanced power’ and ‘power saver’ as required. This feature is clearly aimed at laptop users, with the only downside being that your settings won’t survive a reboot.
The default programs Thunderbird, Firefox, and LibreOffice have also been updated to the latest versions at the time of release. LibreOffice is now up to 7.1.2.
SECURITY IMPROVEMENTS
There are several welcome security updates in Ubuntu 21.04 worthy of highlighting. First, users’ Home folders have finally been made private. This means that users can no longer easily browse the contents of other users’ home folders unless their permissions have been tweaked accordingly.
If you’re planning on installing Ubuntu 21.04 from scratch on an encrypted partition, you’ll be glad to know that a fail-safe now exists in the form of an optional recovery key file, which you can use to recover your system if anything untoward happens. Look out for the option appearing during the install process.
The built-in firewall now has nftables as its default backend. You can still use the more user-friendly ufw frontend to manage the firewall from the command line and should notice no difference in functionality. The main advantages of using nftables over iptables are that it’s easier to use when addressed directly, has no predefined tables or chains making it fully configurable, and should be easier to update with new protocols.
Finally, UEFI Secure Boot has been improved and now supports SBAT-capable shim, grub2, and fwupd, which is a necessary consequence of the recent BootHole security vulnerabilities that were disclosed. The desktop also gains support for smartcard authentication, which can be used in place of passwords for logging on to your system.
The kernel has also been upgraded to 5.11 (Ubuntu 20.10 ships with kernel 5.8) and, in addition to further security fixes, you’ll also benefit from the latest hardware support and other performance improvements. Notable examples include reduced memory swapping thanks to better anonymous memory management, fsync() performance improvements for both ext4 and btrfs filesystems, and support for the latest graphics technologies, such as Intel Rocketlake and AMD Vangogh.
DEVELOPER AND SERVER CHANGES
In its blog announcing Ubuntu 21.04, Canonical focused largely on enterprise users and developers, stressing new Microsoft-friendly integrations such as native Microsoft Active Directory integration and support
for Microsoft’s SQL Server, which have also been backported to Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS.
Elsewhere, you’ll find key toolchains have been updated too, including Python (now version 3.9), Perl, Ruby, and PHP. OpenJDK 16 sits alongside OpenJDK 11 for Java support.
Canonical also appears keen to push LTS server users into upgrading to this new release with lots of major component updates. Rails 6 is a particular highlight, with support for rich text material and a controller-like mailbox along with parallel and action cable testing.
There’s also Openvpn 2.51, with the promise of faster connection setup and improved TLS 1.3, while Needrestart for Servers now comes pre-installed to provide additional help during the update process. It identifies which daemons need to be restarted after library updates and upgrades.
There are more than a dozen other package updates, including QEMU (5.2), Libvirt (7.0), DPDK (20.11.1), Containerd (1.4.4), and Docker.io (20.10.2). Check the release notes at https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/hirsute-hippo-release-notes/19221 for full details.
IS IT TIME TO UPGRADE?
It’s true to say Ubuntu 21.04 is likely to be remembered as the update that finally made Wayland stick as the new default desktop server. But while there isn’t anything major to get excited about, there are enough minor improvements to easily justify moving on up from Ubuntu 20.10 sooner rather than later. Being able to drag and drop files between desktop and applications is potentially worth the update on its own.
It’s a harder sell if you’re currently running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, however. Given the new kernel (5.11) will be shipping in the next point release (20.04.3), there’s no immediate rush to upgrade. Unless you have an urgent need to switch to Wayland, we’d recommend waiting for 22.04 next year—the windowing system will almost certainly be the default by then, and any major issues such as the Nvidia block should be resolved.
For those running the LTS version of Ubuntu Server, it’s currently a trickier call, but given that you can update manually to many of the new packages, you may still prefer to hold fire. Either way, if you can’t wait until next year to upgrade, check out the box (below) to find out how to do so now.