For many in the Ubuntu Community today marks many months of hard work on Ubuntu 12.04 which is our LTS (Long Term Support) Release. So lets have a look at some of the changes you can expect to see in hopefully just a few hours.
Major Changes
First LTS version to come with Unity and GTK3 (instead of Gnome2 and GTK2)
First LTS with Substantial Multi-Arch Support
Implementation of HUD (Heads Up Display Interface)
Rhythmbox becomes Default Media Player
Unix group for sudo has changed from “admin” to “sudo” for compatibility with Debian and
sudo itself.
The System Setting’s “Appearance” panel now allows users to easily configure some
properties of Unity.
The System Setting’s “Privacy” panel gives users some control over logging and other privacy options
Introduction of Landscape Administration in the System Setting’s panel
Introduction of resolveconf for /etc/resolv.conf management to speed up DNS resolution
Enabled RC6 by default for Sandy Bridge systems to conserve power
Installation of Applications through Ubuntu Software Center also installs important add-on modules automatically
MTP support for Android 4.0 phones
Upstart 1.4, and output from Upstart jobs is now logged to per-job files in /var/log/upstart/
OpenStack Essex Introduced
LibreOffice 3.5 Introduced
KVM 1.0 Introduced
3.2.0 Kernel Introduced
This release no longer carries separate amd64 -server and -generic kernel flavors
i386 systems have had their default kernel changed to PAE
Unity 5.10 Introduced
If you have never tried Ubuntu or have stuck with a earlier version feel free to give the Ubuntu Web Tour a spin for a little taste.
These changes were reported in a presentation by Elizabeth Krumbach and Grant Bowman of the Ubuntu California LoCo and their handout can be found here: http://people.ubuntu.com/~lyz/handouts/12.04BALUGHandout.pdf