The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS, codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”.
While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper DVD build or installer bugs, you may find some bugs within. This image is, however, reasonably representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS is released on April 21, 2022.
Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS will be Ubuntu Studio’s first Long-Term Support(LTS) release with the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment.
Special notes:
- Due to the change in desktop environment, directly upgrading to Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS from 20.04 LTS is not supported and will not be supported. However, upgrades from Ubuntu Studio 21.10 will be supported. See the Release Notes for more information. Anecdotally, some people have had success upgrading from 20.04 LTS to a later version, so your mileage may vary.
- The Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS disk image (ISO) exceeds 4.0 GB and cannot be downloaded to some file systems such as FAT32, and may not be readable when burned to a DVD. For this reason, we recommend creating a bootable USB stick with the ISO image.
Images can be obtained from this link: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/22.04/beta/
Full updated information is available in the Release Notes.
New Features
Ubuntu Studio 22.04 LTS includes the new KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS desktop environment. This is a beautiful and functional upgrade to previous versions, and we believe you will like it.
Studio Controls is upgraded to 2.3.0 and includes numerous bug fixes.
OBS Studio is upgraded to version 27.2.3 and works with Wayland sessions. While Wayland is not currently the default, it is available as unsupported and experimental.
There are many other improvements, too numerous to list here. We encourage you to take a look around the freely-downloadable ISO image.
Known Issues
- At this time, the installer (Calamares) will crash when attempting an installation on a manually-partitioned btrfs file system. (LP: #1966774)
- MyPaint crashes upon launching (LP: #1967163), may be resolved after an update.
- There are a few cosmetic issues that should be resolved before final release.
Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://ubuntustudio.org/ubuntu-studio-22-04-lts-release-notes/
Further known issues, mostly pertaining to the desktop environment, can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JammyJellyfish/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu
Additionally, the main Ubuntu release notes contain more generic issues: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/jammy-jellyfish-release-notes/24668
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Does KDE Plasma use more resources than your former desktop environment (Xfce)?
A: In our testing, the increase in resource usage is negligible, and our optimizations were never tied to the desktop environment.
Q: Does Ubuntu Studio contain snaps?
A: Yes. Mozilla’s distribution agreement with Canonical changed, and Ubuntu was forced to no-longer distribute Firefox in a native .deb package. We have found that, after initial launch, Firefox performs just as well as the native .deb package did.
Q: If I install this Beta release, will I have to reinstall when the final release comes out?
A: No. If you keep it updated, your installation will automatically become the final release.
Q: Will you make an ISO with {my favorite desktop environment}?
A: To do so would require creating an entirely new flavor of Ubuntu, which would require going through the Official Ubuntu Flavor application process. Since we’re completely volunteer-run, we don’t have the time or resources to do this. Instead, we recommend you download the official flavor for the desktop environment of your choice and use Ubuntu Studio Installer to get Ubuntu Studio.
Please Test!
This release we are participating in Ubuntu Testing Week, which begins as soon as this beta is released. During this testing cycle we will work with the amazing folks at the Ubuntu Hideout Discord (https://discord.gg/ubuntu). They have created a #testing-cycles channel in Discord and had a very good response with users coming forward and helping with testing. They have expressed a desire to have the Ubuntu Hideout Discord community make an even greater impact during this release.
Whether or not you choose to participate on Discord is up to you. If you do find something that is a legitimate bug, please open a terminal and type “ubuntu-bug (package name)” to file the bug report since this collects valuable information we need when debugging. If you get a popup while something is running saying that something has crashed, don’t hesitate to click on the “send bug report” button.
