Ubuntu

Description

The South African internet entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, who had sold Thawte to VeriSign in 1999 and had spent some time as a space tourist at the International Space Station in 2002, in 2004 founded Canonical Ltd. and released the first version of Ubuntu — 4.10 Warty Warthog — in October 2004. The mission he stated was delivering a high-quality, free Linux operating system to ordinary desktop users, with a new release on a six-monthly basis, with long-term support releases every two years. Ubuntu developed into the most popular Linux distribution installed on desktop computers and cloud servers, with its LTS releases providing the power for a significant fraction of the world’s internet infrastructure.

The name is derived from a philosophy of the Nguni Bantu: Ubuntu translates to “I am because we are”, and it was the intention of Shuttleworth to create a community-developed operating system that belonged to its users.

GNOME Desktop Environment

Ubuntu’s default desktop is GNOME, a clean and modern GUI, featuring a top bar that displays application menus and application system indicators, an Activities overview displaying open windows and providing a search function when activated, and a dock (on the left side) containing pinned application shortcuts and running application indicators. The interface is a very consistent design language in all system applications, settings, files, and utilities all follow the same visual pattern. Users move workspaces in order to organize their open applications across virtual screens. The GNOME Shell extensions ecosystem is a way of adding functionality and visual customization on top of the default configuration.

Software Center & Package Management

Ubuntu’s Software Center gives you a graphical way of finding, installing and uninstalling applications. The catalog includes productivity software, creative software, games, developer tools, and utilities in Snap package format, as well as Debian (.deb) package format. Snap packages use containers that sandbox the applications from the system and from other applications while Debian packages install in a classic way with access to the system. The command-line software package manager apt is used for Debian packages by users who prefer to manage software from the command line.

Snap Packages

Snap packages from the Snap Store package an application together with its dependencies in a self-contained package that installs on any Linux distribution that has Snapd support. Ubuntu installs Snapd by default and it will be the reference platform for Snap distributed software such as Chromium, Firefox, VS Code, Slack and thousands of other applications. Snap packages do an automatic update in the background without any intervention from the administrator.

Security and Updates

Ubuntu has unattended upgrades, which automatically applies security updates to patch security vulnerabilities of the core system, installed packages and the kernel without manually triggering updates. LTS releases have five years of standard security support and five years of extended security maintenance through Ubuntu Pro, which is the entire supported lifetime of an LTS release. The Ubuntu Security Team publishes security notices for all patched security vulnerabilities.

Terminal and Command Line

The GNOME Terminal gives access to the Bash command line, where all the capabilities of command line tools, package management, system configuration tools and scripting provided by the Linux command line are available. Ubuntu comes with a full set of GNU utilities — grep, awk, sed, find, curl, ssh and hundreds of other tools — and Python, Perl and Ruby interpreters. The terminal is essential to how Ubuntu is used in software development and server adm. where command-line workflows are used to handle most system tasks.

Development Environment

Ubuntu is the most widely used version of Linux for software development, and Canonical uses it as the primary platform for Canonical’s own software development, as well as a large number of open source project CI environments. Development tools such as GCC, Clang, Python, Node.js, Go, Rust and Java are installed from the standard repositories. Docker, Kubernetes, LXD, containers, Multipass virtual machine management works well with Ubuntu’s package ecosystem and system structure.

WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

Ubuntu is the default distribution in Windows Subsystem for Linux, which lets you run Ubuntu command-line environment and applications directly in Windows 10 and 11. WSL users access the entire Ubuntu terminal environment and run Linux-native development tools and interact with Windows files from the Ubuntu shell without having to run a separate virtual machine.

LTS Release Cycle

Long-Term Support releases are released every two years and occur in April (using year.04 notation: 22.04, 24.04) and receive five years of Standard support. Interim releases between LTS versions release every six months with nine months of support to provide support to users who want to use new versions of software before it reaches the next LTS. Most production server releases and enterprise Ubuntu releases use LTS releases for their longer support cycle.