Canonical Releases Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus

Canonical, company behind Ubuntu Linux, releases Ubuntu 16.05 LTS code-name Xenial Xerus today as it was scheduled . This release is LTS ( long term support ) , it will get support for next five years , from software updates to critical security patches .

Whats New / Updated

Snap
Lxd
LXC 2.0
Zfs and CephFS
Fglrx is deprecated

Other

Firefox 45
Thunderbird 38
Chromium 48
LibreOffice 5.1
Nautilus (aka ‘Files’) 3.14.2
Unity 7.4

Snap

New Application format , can be installed alongside with traditional deb packages . Snap brings more robust updates and more isolation . New tools, snapcraft will allow developers to convert or build new ubuntu packages. Snap applications will be isolated from rest of the systems.

ZFS

ZFS is a combined file system (Like NTFS and ext4 ) and logical volume manager ( Like LVM ) designed by Sun Microsystems. zfs is now officially supported by canonical . you can setup and install open zfs in ubuntu . See more about ZFS and LXD both working together : see canonical blog post .

Some awesome features of ZFS

snapshots
copy-on-write cloning
continuous integrity checking against data corruption
automatic repair
efficient data compression

Ubuntu ZFS Reference Guide : https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/ZFS

LXD

LXD ( pronounced “lex‐dee” ) is container engine from canonical , LXD perovide REST API for LXC containers. technically LXD and Docker share some underlying kernel capabilities , now even with Ubuntu 16.04, you can run your Docker containers inside LXD containers.