Ubuntu is one of the best -- if not the best -- desktop Linux-based operating systems. Many people, including me, trust it for their computing needs every day. Best of all, Canonical releases special LTS versions every two years, offering a super-long five years of support.

Tomorrow, the latest such LTS version, 16.04, will see its official release. I've been running pre-release versions of this operating system for a while now, and it has been brilliantly stable. Tomorrow's release will be the best Ubuntu ever, featuring things like new snap packages, CephFS, and ZFS-on-Linux.

"The security mechanisms in snap packages allow for much faster iteration across all versions of Ubuntu and Ubuntu derivatives, as snap applications are isolated from the rest of the system. Users can install a snap without having to worry whether it will have an impact on their other apps or their system. Similarly, developers have a much better handle on the update cycle as they can decide to bundle specific versions of a library with their app. Operationally, transactional updates make deployments of snap packages more robust and reliable", says Canonical.

The Ubuntu maintainer further says, "also included in this release is support for ZFS-on-Linux, a combination of a volume manager and filesystem which enables efficient snapshots, copy-on-write cloning, continuous integrity checking against data corruption, automatic filesystem repair, and data compression. ZFS-on-Linux is a mature filesystem based on work published by Sun Microsystems under a free software license nearly a decade ago, and which is widely used in cloud and container operations on Ubuntu".

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While Ubuntu has been a high-quality desktop operating system for years, Canonical is not satisfied there. The company wants to capture some of the mobile market too. Having just launched its first tablet with BQ, the company hopes that 16.04 will become a unified platform for all devices -- including single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi.

Microsoft and Canonical have been very close lately, especially by bringing Ubuntu to Windows 10. Of course, Azure is leveraging Ubuntu too. Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise division says the following.

Our relationship with Canonical showcases our deep commitment to customer choice and flexibility for cloud workloads. With Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, customers can take advantage of the powerful combination of Canonical’s latest release of Ubuntu with Microsoft Azure

If you want to try it, you can get it from Ubuntu.com tomorrow. Will you download it? Tell me in the comments.

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