Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu
18.10, focused on multi-cloud deployments, AI software development, a new
community desktop theme and richer snap desktop integration.
"Ubuntu is now the world's reference platform for AI engineering
and analytics" said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical. "We accelerate
developer productivity and help enterprises operate at speed and at scale,
across multiple clouds and diverse edge appliances."
This year, the financial services industry has engaged
significantly with Canonical and Ubuntu for infrastructure efficiency on
premise and to accelerate their move to the cloud. The push for machine
learning analytics and of fintech efforts around blockchain, distributed ledger
applications and cryptocurrencies are current drivers of Ubuntu investments and
deployments.
Optimised for multi-cloud computing
Ubuntu Server 18.10 images are available on all major public
clouds, including minimal images popular for container workloads with a small
footprint and fast boot time. For private clouds, Ubuntu 18.10 ships with
OpenStack Rocky for AI and NFV hardware acceleration and Ceph Mimic to reduce
storage overhead. Ubuntu Server 18.10 includes the latest Kubernetes version
1.12 which brings increased security and scalability by automating the
provisioning of clusters with transport layer encryption and is more responsive
to dynamic workloads through faster scaling.
Snap momentum strengthens
Ubuntu's secure Linux app store sports 4,100 snaps published by
1,700 developers and supported across 41 Linux distributions. Official desktop
snaps from Spotify,
Plex
and Skype
are popular, and major public cloud and server applications are now available
including Google
Cloud SDK, AWS
CLI, and Azure
CLI. The new release enables native desktop controls to access files on the
host system.
Improved gaming performance
The Linux 4.18 kernel together with updates in Mesa and X.org
significantly improve game performance. Graphics support expands to AMD VegaM
in the latest Intel Kabylake-G CPUs, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, B+ and Qualcomm
Snapdragon 845.
Ubuntu 18.10 introduces the GNOME 3.30 desktop and Yaru, the new
community-developed default theme. Fingerprint unlock functionality is featured
for compatible PCs and the latest versions of Firefox, LibreOffice, and
Chromium are included.