“The overall response was positive,” said Will Cooke, engineering director for desktop at Canonical. The development team tweaked the GNOME shell just enough to give it a face that clearly identifies it as part of Ubuntu.

These release notes for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and its flavors

Support lifespan

The ‘main’ archive of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until April 2023. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, and Ubuntu Core. Ubuntu Studio 18.04 will be supported for 9 months. All other flavors will be supported for 3 years.

Official flavors

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

• Kubuntu https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BionicBeaver/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu

• Lubuntu https://lubuntu.me/bionic-released/

• Ubuntu Budgie https://ubuntubudgie.org/blog/2018/04/26/18-04-lts-ubuntu-budgie-released

• Ubuntu Kylin https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BionicBeaver/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuKylin

• Ubuntu MATE https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-bionic-final-release/

• Ubuntu Studio https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BionicBeaver/ReleaseNotes/UbuntuStudio

• Xubuntu http://wiki.xubuntu.org/releases/18.04/release-notes

Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth has revealed the codename of Ubuntu 18.04. It’s called Bionic Beaver.

• 26th April: Stable Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release

The problem is, over 800 packages are currently stuck in the bionic-proposed repo. In comparison, there were only 110 packages waiting in the proposed repo at the end of Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark)’s development cycle

Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) was the first Ubuntu release to ship with Wayland as default display server, while the XOrg session was put on the back seat. Now it looks like wants to play it safe for their next LTS (Long-Term Support) release, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), and decided to go with the old XOrg graphics stack by default for new installations.

In a mailing list announcement published on Friday, Canonical’s Matthias Klose announced that the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system is now officially open for development.

Video acceleration, audio, networking and Bluetooth improvements

“In Pulse Audio we’ve dropped some more patches for Android support (from Ubuntu Touch) bringing us more inline with upstream.