Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" Formally Opens For Development

The Ubuntu 20.04 cycle is now officially underway. Following the recent release of Ubuntu 19.10, the "Focal" archive has been created and back to syncing against the latest Debian unstable packages.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development has kicked off with:

- Python 3.8 as the default Python 3 version.

- Perl 5.30 is now in place.

- For the IBM s390x target, it's now built targeting z13.

- Ubuntu/Debian developers are still working on removing Python 2 packages. Dropping Python 2 is a goal for Ubuntu 20.04 especially since it's a long-term support release and Python 2 being EOL'ed already at the end of the year.

So with that, Ubuntu Focal Fossa is open for development.

Other work expected for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS includes continued improvements around ZFS/Zsys, GNOME 3.36 with more performance improvements, the Linux ~5.5 kernel should ultimately be powering this release, Mesa 20.0 and many open-source graphics driver improvements, PHP 7.4 should make it on the server side, and the other usual features being pursued for making it a dandy Ubuntu Long-Term Support release and having the other newest software packages as of release time.