Yes, it is that time of the year! After six months of heavy development, Ubuntu 20.04, codenamed Focal Fossa, has been released on 23rd April 2020. It succeeds Ubuntu 19.10 as the latest stable release of the operating system.

Ubuntu 20.04 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release. That means official support will be provided for 5 years, i.e., till 2025. For the non-Long Term Support or Short Term Support releases, official support is provided for 9 months. LTS releases are released every 2 years.

Ubuntu 20.04 comes with improvements to several aspects of the OS; boot speed, bundled apps, appearance. In this article, let us see how to upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 so that we can try out the latest features.

Command do-release-upgrade

do-release-upgrade is the command line application to upgrade Ubuntu to the latest available version. It is a single step, easy to run command, with which the user need not take any backup of his existing installed software.

To run the command, open terminal by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T, or by clicking the Terminal icon from the dock.

Note that to upgrade to a latest Ubuntu release, the command needs that all installed software is updated to latest version. If it is not, run the following commands to update it:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Now, run the command do-release-upgrade in the terminal.

do-release-upgrade -d

Notice the -d flag added with the command. This is done because upgrade to latest LTS is not directly available till July of the year of release of the LTS. So Ubuntu 20.04 upgrade will be available only in July 2020. However, the -d flag forces the command to upgrade to the latest development release, and it also considers an LTS release as a development release.

If you are running this command after July 2020, you can simply run:

do-release-upgrade

If there are third-party repositories added to your sources.list file (list of repositories to install/update software from), the upgrade process will prompt you to continue. Simply press Enter and let the process continue, you can add the third party repositories back after the process is complete.

Third party repositories are usually added to install software which is not available in official Ubuntu repositories. Eg. Skype, Google Chrome, etc.

Once the upgrade tool performs some pre-processes, it will print summary of all the changes that will be done if the upgrade is performed. It asks the user a final confirmation for upgrade. Press Y and Enter to continue the upgrade. You can also enter d to see the changes in detail, with a list of packages which are going to be changed.

Detailed information after pressing d.

Press q to go back to earlier prompt to continue the upgrade.

After entering Y, the upgrade process disables the lock screen, and again asks the user to press Enter to continue.

You should let the process continue till the end now. Interrupting the upgrade in between is not recommended as it might crash your Ubuntu installation. Make sure you plug in to a power source and you have proper internet connectivity (around 1.5 GB of data is downloaded) to allow the process to finish uninterruptedly.

After the process completes, you can run command lsb_release -a to verify if Ubuntu has been upgraded.

Restart the computer to check out all new features in Ubuntu 20.04!