Ubuntu 21.04 Beta is here to give us an early taste of the new features and improvements Canonical planned for the next major release of the popular Linux distro. These include the latest Linux 5.11 kernel series, Wayland by default on most configurations, PipeWire support, and nftables as default backend for the firewall. While it sticks to the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series, Ubuntu 21.04 comes with many updated apps from the latest GNOME 40 stack. In addition, it now features support for smartcard authentication, improved AD (Active Directory) integration, and the ability to change the power profile from settings.