Download Ubuntu 20.04. Here is how to upgrade Ubuntu 20.04 from Ubuntu 18.04 or update Ubuntu 20.04 from Ubuntu 19.10. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is provided for 5 years until April 2025 for Ubuntu Desktop.
New Features in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
As with every Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS comes with a selection of the latest and greatest software developed by the free software community.
Linux Kernel
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is based on the long-term supported Linux release series 5.4. Notable features and enhancements in 5.4 since 5.3 include:
- Support for new hardware including Intel Comet Lake CPUs and initial Tiger Lake platforms, Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 & 855 SoCs, AMD Navi 12 and 14 GPUs, Arcturus and Renoir APUs along with Navi 12 + Arcturus power features.
- Support has been added for the exFAT filesystem, virtio-fs for sharing filesystems with virtualized guests and fs-verity for detecting file modifications.
- Built in support for the WireGuard VPN.
- Enablement of lockdown in integrity mode.
Other notable kernel updates to 5.4 since version 4.15 released in 18.04 LTS include:
- Support for AMD Rome CPUs, Radeon RX Vega M and Navi GPUs, Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 and other ARM SoCs and Intel Cannon Lake platforms.
- Support for raspberry pi (Pi 2B, Pi 3B, Pi 3A+, Pi 3B+, CM3, CM3+, Pi 4B)
- Significant power-saving improvements.
- Numerous USB 3.2 and Type-C improvements.
- A new mount API, the io_uring interface, KVM support for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization and pidfd support.
- Boot speed improvements through changing the default kernel compression algorithm to lz4 (in Ubuntu 19.10) on most architectures, and changing the default initramfs compression algorithm to lz4 on all architectures.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS comes with refreshed state-of-the-art toolchain including new upstream releases of glibc 2.31, OpenJDK 11, rustc 1.41, GCC 9.3, Python 3.8.2, ruby 2.7.0, php 7.4, perl 5.30, golang 1.13.
Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or 19.10
- You can upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from either Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or Ubuntu 19.10.
- Ensure that you have all updates installed for your current version of Ubuntu before you upgrade.
To upgrade on a desktop system:
- Open the “Software & Updates” Setting in System Settings.
- Select the 3rd Tab called “Updates”.
- Set the “Notify me of a new Ubuntu version” drop down menu to “For long-term support versions” if you are using 18.04 LTS; set it to “For any new version” if you are using 19.10.
- Press Alt+F2 and type update-manager -c -d into the command box.
- Update Manager should open up and tell you that Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is now available.
- If not you can run /usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/check-new-release-gtk
- Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.
To upgrade on a server system:
- Install update-manager-core if it is not already installed.
- Make sure the Prompt line in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to ‘normal’ if you want non-LTS upgrades, or ‘lts’ if you only want LTS upgrades.
- Launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.
There are no offline upgrade options for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.
Upgrades on i386
Users of the i386 architecture will not be presented with an upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Support for i386 as a host architecture was dropped in 19.10.