We’re happy to announce that Colab has upgraded its default runtime to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. You can read more about the distribution changes here.

With this upgrade, we’re still a release behind the latest Ubuntu long-term support release (22.04 LTS) and we’ll continue working hard to upgrade Colab to the latest release in the coming months.

Colab’s fallback runtime version

Using the fallback runtime version temporarily allows access to the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS runtime, and will be available until late-January. This is available from the Command Palette via the “Use fallback runtime version” command when connected to a runtime. Of note, this setting does not persist across sessions — the command will need to be invoked on each new session.

Please report any problems you experience with the new release here.