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 significant new features will be implemented on Ubuntu 21.04 until the final release is expected by the end of April 2021.
So developers will no longer focus their efforts on fixing new features so that the final release is not delayed. With the name “Hirsute Hippo”, Ubuntu 21.04 has been in development since late 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.
Η new edition Ubuntu 21.04 will come with GNOME 3.38 as the default desktop, but will likely bring many of the GNOME 40 apps 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 series (GNU Compiler Collection), Python 3.9 by default, GNU C Library 2.33, LLVM 11 and hopefully the Linux 5.11 kernel. The distribution currently runs the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel by default. Some of the latest applications 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.