Canonical, the firm behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced the availability of Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS. The new updates come just a week after the firm pushed Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS which includes all the latest patches on a brand new ISO. The two updates for the older LTSs also include the latest patches in newly spun ISOs helping users to save time post-installation as fewer updates will need installing.
The most interesting of the two releases is Ubuntu 18.04.5, this update includes hardware enablement stacks that add support for newer hardware. The new hardware support is available for all the supported architectures and comes out of the box when you install Ubuntu using one of the desktop images. Ubuntu Server will default to the GA kernel but the HWE kernel with new hardware support is available from the installer bootloader.
With Ubuntu 16.04.7, Canonical was mainly focused on the security of Ubuntu. It includes patches that protect new installations from recently discovered GRUB 2 vulnerabilities. It’s worth highlighting that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which launched on April 21, 2016, is set to stop receiving updates in April. For this reason, you may want to think about upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu, this can be done through the update manager (for in-place upgrades) or with a clean installation.
If you’d like to download either of these two versions, you can do so by heading to the Ubuntu Releases page which contains links to previous versions of the distribution.