Ubuntu Portal

Ubuntu Portal is your hands-on reference for everything Ubuntu — from release timelines and desktop environment deep-dives to CLI administration, hardware driver wrangling, and the small utilities that make daily Linux life bearable. Whether you landed here looking for a clean Nvidia Optimus setup, a quick apt refresher, or the lowdown on what actually changed between 22.04 and 24.04, you’re in the right place. We’ve been running Ubuntu on everything from battered ThinkPads to homelab rack servers since the Warty Warthog days, and every guide on this site reflects that kind of mileage. Below you’ll find our most popular how-to guides, the latest release coverage, and a few starting points for newcomers who want to stop guessing and start understanding their system.

Popular How-To Guides

These are the pages readers come back to again and again — and for good reason. Each one walks through a real task, with real commands, and flags the gotchas we’ve hit ourselves over the years.

• CLI Basics: apt, dpkg, and Package Management — If you only read one docs page, make it this one. Covers apt update vs apt upgrade, pinning packages, cleaning the cache, and the subtle differences between apt and apt-get that still trip people up in 2026.

• Nvidia Optimus on Ubuntu: PRIME, Bumblebee, and Beyond — Hybrid GPU setups remain one of the most frustrating experiences in Linux. This guide cuts through the noise: which approach works on which Ubuntu version, how to check your active renderer, and what to do when the login screen goes black after a kernel update.

• Filesystems and Mounts: fstab, UUID, and Recovery — If you’ve ever fat-fingered an fstab entry and booted into emergency mode, you know why this page exists. We cover UUID vs LABEL, common mount options for ext4 and NTFS, and how to recover when things go sideways.

• Step-by-Step Guides — Longer walkthroughs for tasks that deserve more than a Stack Exchange answer: desktop environment installs, printer driver setup, kernel upgrades, and more.

• Linux Tools & Utilities — Screenshot editors, terminal emulators, batch image resizers, and other small apps that earn a permanent spot in your workflow.

Why these? Because they represent the questions we see most often in forums, comment threads, and our own inboxes. Ubuntu is enormously capable out of the box, but the moment you need to do something slightly off the beaten path — dual-GPU rendering, mounting a second drive at boot, rolling back a broken package — you want a guide written by someone who’s actually done it. That’s what we aim for here.

Latest Releases

Ubuntu’s release cadence is one of its great strengths: a new version every six months, with LTS releases every two years that get five (sometimes ten) years of support. But keeping track of which version introduced Wayland by default, or when the installer switched to the new Flutter-based UI, is harder than it should be.

Our Ubuntu Releases Timeline page is the place to sort all of that out. Here’s a quick snapshot of recent milestones:

• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS “Noble Numbat” — The latest long-term support release. Ships with GNOME 46, improved App Center, and a refined desktop installer. If you’re running production servers or want maximum stability on your daily driver, this is the one.

• Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” — A solid interim release that previewed several features that landed in 24.04, including the revamped firmware updater and kernel 6.5.

• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” — Still the workhorse LTS for many teams. GNOME 42, Wayland as the default session (finally), and broad PPA ecosystem support.

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS “Focal Fossa” — Entering its extended maintenance window. If you’re still on Focal, our timeline page covers what you need to know about upgrade paths.

Head over to the full releases timeline for the complete history going back to Warty Warthog 4.10 — including codenames, notable changes, and “who is this release for?” guidance on every LTS.

Getting Started

New to Ubuntu, or coming back after a few years away? The ecosystem moves fast, and what was true in 2018 might not be true now. (Remember when Unity was the default desktop? Feels like another era.) Here’s where to start:

Pick Your Entry Point

• Documentation Hub — Our docs section is structured around the tasks you’ll actually need to perform: managing packages, configuring storage, understanding permissions, and more. Start with CLI Basics if the terminal is new to you, or jump straight to Filesystems and Mounts if you’re setting up a multi-drive workstation.

• Step-by-Step Guides — These are longer, more detailed walkthroughs. Think of them as the difference between a man page and a tutorial: we explain the why, not just the what. Topics range from installing alternative desktop environments to configuring printer drivers that Ubuntu doesn’t ship out of the box.

• Hardware Guides — Got a laptop with an Nvidia GPU and an Intel iGPU? A Canon printer that only has a .deb package from 2014? The hardware section is where we cover the messy reality of making peripherals and components work reliably on Ubuntu.

A Few Practical Tips for Day One

1. Run sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade first. Always. Even on a fresh install. The ISO image is a snapshot in time, and there are almost certainly security patches waiting.

2. Learn journalctl early. When something breaks — and something will break eventually — journalctl -xe is your first diagnostic step. It’s more useful than most people realize.

3. Back up your /etc/fstab before editing it. Seriously. A single typo in that file can prevent your system from booting. sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak takes two seconds and saves hours.

4. Don’t blindly add PPAs. Third-party repositories are powerful, but every PPA you add is a trust decision. Check when it was last updated, who maintains it, and whether the package is available in the official repos first.

5. Bookmark the Releases page. Knowing where your version sits in the support lifecycle — and when it’s time to upgrade — prevents the single biggest source of “my system is broken” posts: running an EOL release with no security updates.

Recently Updated

We don’t publish and forget. Guides get updated when Ubuntu ships a new LTS, when upstream tools change their packaging, or when we discover a better approach to a problem. Here’s what’s been refreshed recently:

• Nvidia Optimus on Ubuntu — Updated for 24.04 LTS and the latest nvidia-driver-550 package series.
• CLI Basics — Added notes on apt changes in Noble Numbat and the nala frontend that’s gaining popularity.
• Filesystems and Mounts — Expanded the recovery section with systemd emergency shell steps for modern Ubuntu installs.
• Ubuntu Releases Timeline — Added 24.04 LTS with full details.

Browse by Section

Everything on Ubuntu Portal is written from direct experience with the systems we’re describing. No regurgitated man pages, no “just Google it” shrugs — just practical Linux knowledge, organized so you can find it when you need it.