Ubuntu Focal Fossa (20.04) is around the corner and we are prepping our VMs (Nextcloud & WordPress) to be able to run the latest LTS of Ubuntu.

UPDATE: Please read this for more information.

Deprecation

When the new fixes are implemented we will deprecate the following OS and dependencies from officially being supported:

  • Ubuntu 16.04
  • Any version lower than PHP 7.2 (eventually we will only allow PHP 7.4)
  • MySQL/MariaDB

That means essentially that anyone still running any of the above will not be able to run most of the VM scripts anymore. For example, the update script will not work for any Ubuntu 16.04 user.

Options

As an end-user you have several options:

We recommend

Our instant recommendation to make the eventual migration easier is to run the built in update script as soon as possible. From your CLI type this command and hit ENTER: 

sudo bash /var/scripts/update.sh

Running a server with old dependencies is never a good idea, and it’s also very much work to keep all our VMs compatible with all different versions of it’s dependencies. As Ubuntu 16.04 is in it’s last year of maintenance support, the time has come for our VMs to stop supporting it as well.

The new release will be great!

With that said, the Ubuntu 20.04 release will be great! It seems like ZFS will be supported from the installer, which means that both disks will be on ZFS starting from 20.04!

New dependencies are PostgreSQL 12, and PHP 7.4 – which means much improved speed for servers in general. Also, 20.04 runs the 5.4 kernel, meaning better support on different hardware.

If you’re still running Ubuntu 16.04 there’s been a ton of changes since. Our VMs always keeps evolving, and this one is no exception!

Release date

We don’t have a final release date yet, but keep your eyes open on Twitter, or Gitub. Ubuntu 20.04 is released in the end of April, and we expect to release the new VMs shortly after that.