As of today upcoming version of Ubuntu operating system 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) is moving to Feature stage Freeze, a major milestone in its six-month development cycle.
The Feature Freeze stage means that no other major new ones will be implemented functions on Ubuntu 21.04 until the final release expected in late April 2021.
So developers will no longer focus their efforts on fixing new features so as not to delay the final release. Named "Hirsute Hippo", Ubuntu 21.04 has been in development since the end of October 2020, shortly after the release of Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla).
As usual, the Freeze Freeze stage will soon be followed by an optional "Ubuntu Testing Week", which will take place between March 4-11 and is intended for those who want to help with the testing.
"Ideally, from now on you will all focus on fixing bugs rather than introducing new features to the traffic," Brian Murray said on behalf of the Ubuntu Release team in a statement to mailing list.
The new version of Ubuntu 21.04 will come with GNOME 3.38 as the default interface, but will likely bring many of the GNOME 40 applications for a hybrid experience.
Another important change in Ubuntu 21.04 is the fact that Wayland will be the default session, with the X.Org session as an alternative for NVIDIA users and those with hardware not supported by Wayland.
There will be an updated toolchain based on the latest GCC 11 (GNU Compiler Collection) series, Python 3.9 from prechoice, the GNU C Library 2.33, LLVM 11 and hopefully the Linux kernel 5.11. Currently the distribution uses Linux kernel 5.10 LTS by default. Some of the latest apps will also be available.
The final version of Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) will arrive on April 22, 2021 and will only be supported for nine months, until July 2021.
Until then, however, we will be able to get a first taste of Ubuntu 21.04 with the beta version, which is expected to be released in April.