Python 3.8.0 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations. This tutorial helps you install Python 3.8 on Ubuntu.

Major new features of Python 3.8.0

• Assignment expressions
• Positional-only arguments
• Python Initialization Configuration (improved embedding)
• Vectorcall: a fast calling protocol for CPython
• Runtime audit hooks
• Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-band data
• Typing-related: Final qualifier, Literal types, and TypedDict
• Parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode
• Debug builds share ABI as release builds
• f-strings support a handy = specifier for debugging
• continue is now legal in finally: blocks
• on Windows, the default asyncio event loop is now ProactorEventLoop
• on macOS, the spawn start method is now used by default in multiprocessing
• multiprocessing can now use shared memory segments to avoid pickling costs between processes
• typed_ast is merged back to CPython
• LOAD_GLOBAL is now 40% faster
• pickle now uses Protocol 4 by default, improving performance

Installation

Step 1: Add deadsnakes team PPA

The deadsnakes team PPA maintains most recent packages for Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa

Step 2 – Install Python 3.8

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3.8

Step 3– Check Python Version

python3.8 -V

How to uninstall

You can run the following command in terminal to purge the PPA which also remove the installed 3.8 packages.

sudo apt install ppa-purge && sudo ppa-purge ppa:deadsnakes/ppa