The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Studio 23.10, codenamed “Lunar Lobster”.
While this beta is reasonably free of any showstopper installer bugs, you may find some bugs within. This image is, however, mostly representative of what you will find when Ubuntu Studio 23.04 is released on April 20, 2023.
Special notes:
The Ubuntu Studio 22.10 disk image (ISO) exceeds 4 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 downloading to a compatible file system. When creating a boot medium, we recommend creating a bootable USB stick with the ISO image, or burning to a Dual-Layer DVD.
Images can be obtained from this link: https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/23.04/beta/
Full updated information, including Upgrade Instructions, are available in the Release Notes.
New Features This Release
- PipeWire is now enabled with JACK support by default. More on that here.
- Ubuntu Studio Installer has been completely rewritten from the ground-up and can be used to remove components you don’t want. Version 1.4
- Patchance, a simple patchbay for JACK (works with Pipewire with JACK). version 1.0.0
- We have changed back to the Materia theme first used in Ubuntu Studio 19.04, this time using the dark theme by default.
- Entirely new Login Screen and Lock Screen Theme based on the Materia theme. This is to differentiate from the Breeze theme traditionally used in KDE Plasma and used mostly in Kubuntu, as to set our default setup apart and to not simply be “Kubuntu with a bunch of extra packages.”
Major Package Upgrades
- Darktable version 4.2.1
- Gimp version 2.10.34
- Ardour version 7.3.0
- OBS Studio version 29.0.2
- Audacity version 3.2.4
- digiKam version 8.0.0-beta1
- Kdenlive version 22.12.3
- Krita version 5.1.5
There are many other improvements, too numerous to list here. We encourage you to look around the freely-downloadable ISO image.
Known Issues
- digiKam is a beta release of 8.0.0. As such, it may have undocumented bugs. We hope these bugs get ironed out by the time 8.0.0 stable comes out, and the digiKam developers have set a goal for April 2023 for a release. When the 8.0.0 stable release of digiKam becomes available, we hope to provide these to you as a Stable Release Update. If you would like a stable version of digiKam now, a snap of 7.8.0 is available.
Official Ubuntu Studio release notes can be found at https://ubuntustudio.org/ubuntu-studio-23-04-release-notes/
Further known issues, mostly pertaining to the desktop environment, can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LunarLobster/ReleaseNotes/Kubuntu (when available)
Additionally, the main Ubuntu release notes contain more generic issues: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/kinetic-kudu-release-notes/27976
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 numerous improvements, Firefox now performs just as well as the native .deb package did.
Additionally, Freeshow is an Electron-based application. Electron-based applications cannot be packaged in the Ubuntu repositories in that they cannot be packaged in a traditional Debian source package. While such apps do have a build system to create a .deb binary package, it circumvents the source package build system in Launchpad, which is required when packaging for Ubuntu. However, Electron apps also have a facility for creating snaps, which can be uploaded included. Therefore, for Freeshow to be included in Ubuntu Studio, it had to be packaged as a snap.
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. However, if Audacity returns to the Ubuntu repositories before final release, then you might end-up with a double-installation of Audacity. Removal instructions of one or the other will be made available in a future post.
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.
Q: What if I don’t want all these packages installed on my machine?
A: Simply use the Ubuntu Studio Installer to remove the features of Ubuntu Studio you don’t want or need!
