Canonical has released Ubuntu 19.10 with a focus on accelerating developer productivity in AI/ML, new edge capabilities for MicroK8s and delivering fast GNOME desktop performance.

Ubuntu 19.10 brings enhanced edge computing capabilities with the addition of strict confinement to MicroK8s. Strict confinement ensures complete isolation in a production-grade Kubernetes environment, all in a small footprint ideal for edge gateways. MicroK8s add-ons – including Istio, Knative, CoreDNS, Prometheus, and Jaeger – can now be deployed at the edge with a single command.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is supported by Ubuntu 19.10. The latest board from the Raspberry Pi Foundation offers a faster system-on-a-chip with a processor that uses the Cortex-A72 architecture (quad-core 64-bit ARMv8 at 1.5GHz) and offers up to 4GB of RAM. With the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, developers get access to a low-cost board, powerful enough to orchestrate workloads at the edge with MicroK8s.

Ubuntu 19.10 ships with the Train release of Charmed OpenStack – the 20th OpenStack release, backed by the Nautilus release of Ceph. Train provides live migration extensions to aid telcos in their infrastructure operations. Live migration allows users to move their machines from one hypervisor to another without shutting down the operating system of the machine. It is now also possible in telco-specific environments with NUMA topology, pinned CPUs, SR-IOV ports attached and huge pages configured. Nautilus introduces the automatic placement group tuning feature to improve the experience of operating a Ceph distributed storage cluster.

Kubeflow is now available as an add-on to MicroK8s for improved machine learning and AI capabilities. In minutes, developers can set-up, develop, test and scale to their production needs. Kubeflow and GPU acceleration work out the box with MicroK8s. All dependencies are included with automatic updates and transactional security fixes so users can spend less time configuring and more time innovating.

Ubuntu 19.10 will ship with NVIDIA drivers embedded in the ISO image to improve the performance for gamers and AI/ML users with NVIDIA hardware. Ubuntu 19.10 uses the 5.3 kernel, which introduces support for the AMD Navi GPUs and Zhaoxin x86 processors for workstations.

With GNOME 3.34, Ubuntu 19.10 is the fastest release yet with performance improvements delivering a more responsive experience, even on older hardware. App organisation is easier with the ability to drag and drop icons into categorised folders, while users can select light or dark Yaru theme variants.

Native support for ZFS on the root partition is introduced as an experimental desktop installer option. Coupled with the new zsys package, benefits include automated snapshots of file system states, allowing users to boot to a previous update and easily roll forwards and backwards in case of failure.

Ubuntu 19.10 will be available to download here.