Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" Begins Development

Canonical today formally opened the "Jammy" archive for development for what will be the next version of Ubuntu, 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish".

Ubuntu 22.04 as the "Jammy Jellyfish" is due out in April as the next Long Term Support release. The archive is now open for development to begin and auto-syncing from Debian is beginning.

Python 3.10 changes will begin to land in Ubuntu 22.04. Also another big change this cycle is OpenSSL 3.0. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is also planning to ship with PHP 8.1, Ruby 3.0, GNOME 42.0, and an assortment of other package updates ahead over the next half-year. It's great that they appear to jump from GNOME Shell 40 to 42 for this LTS cycle rather than aiming just for the recently released GNOME 41 components, thus returning them to the point of shipping the latest GNOME desktop components as of release time.

Mesa 22.0 should be part of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for fresh open-source graphics driver support. On the kernel side we'll hopefully see at least Linux 5.16 make it if not Linux 5.17 for delivering the latest hardware support and other low-level improvements. As per tradition, unfortunately Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will more than likely be sticking to GCC 11 as the code compiler with GCC 12 coming close to the April release and thus not upgrading the compiler to a major new version until the XX.10 release.

It will be interesting to see this cycle if the new Ubuntu desktop installer is in good enough shape to become the default for this Long Term Support release. The new Ubuntu desktop installer remains under heavy development, so we'll see how it matures over the next six months.

The Ubuntu 22.04 release schedule puts the official Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release on 21 April. The notice of Jammy being open for development was made this afternoon on ubuntu-devel-announce.

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