Introduction

These release notes for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and its flavors.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be released on April 23.

Ubuntu 20.04 is still in beta and is not recommended for use on production systems or on your primary computers yet.

Support lifespan

The 'main' archive of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until April 2025. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, and Ubuntu Core. All other flavors will be supported for 3 years.

Official flavor release notes

Find the links to release notes for official flavors here.

Get Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS

Download Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Images can be downloaded from a location near you.

You can download ISOs and flashable images from:

TODO

Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or 19.10

• You can upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from either Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or Ubuntu 19.10.
• Ensure that you have all updates installed for your current version of Ubuntu before you upgrade.

To upgrade on a desktop system:

• Open the "Software & Updates" Setting in System Settings.

• Select the 3rd Tab called "Updates".
• Set the "Notify me of a new Ubuntu version" drop down menu to "For long-term support versions" if you are using 18.04 LTS; set it to "For any new version" if you are using 19.10.

• Press Alt+F2 and type update-manager -c -d into the command box.

• Update Manager should open up and tell you that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is now available.

• If not you can run  /usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/check-new-release-gtk

• Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade on a server system:

• Install update-manager-core if it is not already installed.

• Make sure the Prompt line in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to 'normal' if you want non-LTS upgrades, or 'lts' if you only want LTS upgrades.

• Launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d

• Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.

There are no offline upgrade options for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.

Upgrades on i386

Users of the i386 architecture will not be presented with an upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Support for i386 as a host architecture was dropped in 19.10.

Updated Packages

As with every Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 20.04 comes with a selection of the latest and greatest software developed by the free software community.

Ubuntu Desktop

• GNOME 3.36

Security Improvements

Network configuration

Other base system changes since 18.04 LTS

Snap Store

The Snap Store (snap-store) replaces ubuntu-software as the default tool for finding and installing packages and snaps.

Ubuntu Server

s390x

IBM Z and LinuxONE / s390x-specific enhancements (since 19.10) include (partly not limited to s390x):

• Todo

Performance tests showed (1868113) that it is beneficial to use 'Striding RQ' with RoCE Express 2 and 2.1 PCIe cards (ConnectX-4) on IBM z14 and LinuxONE Rockhopper II / Emperor II and newer - but this is not the default. Hence if one has RoCE 2 or 2.1 hardware plugged in to such a system, the enablement of 'Striding RQ' should be considered, like:
ethtool --set-priv-flags <ifname> rx_striding_rq on
For the reason of persistence one may also create a service or udev-rule that sets this at boot time.

Server installer

Known issues

As is to be expected, with any release, there are some significant known bugs that users may run into with this release of Ubuntu 20.04. The ones we know about at this point (and some of the workarounds), are documented here so you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

Installer and live session

• Ubuntu now defaults to checking the integrity of the medium in use when booting into live sessions. This can be skipped by hitting Ctrl-C, but due to a bug the message that tells you to hit this key is not shown in some flavours. (Bug #1870018)

Kernel

Desktop

Server

Raspberry Pi

Official flavours

The release notes for the official flavors can be found at the following links:

• TODO

More information

Reporting bugs

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve the quality of future releases. Please report bugs using the tools provided.

If you want to help out with bugs, the Bug Squad is always looking for help.

Participate in Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

• https://community.ubuntu.com/contribute

More about Ubuntu

You can find out more about Ubuntu on the Ubuntu website and Ubuntu wiki.

To sign up for future Ubuntu development announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu's development announcement list at:

• https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce