GDAL is a very useful library if you are especially into geoprocessing. GDAL can be used with a number of raster and vector formats and offers different functionalities to perform different analysis with those data. GDAL can even be used with PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Oracle Spatial etc. which is awesome.

The latest version of GDAL (or any other GIS Packages) are available from UbuntuGIS-Stable PPA which needed to be added to the apt-repository. For this, run:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntugis/ppa

Do system upgrade as:

sudo apt update

sudo apt -y upgrade

Then you can install the latest version of GDAL as:

sudo apt -y install gdal-bin python-gdal (if you are using python 2)

sudo apt -y install gdal-bin python3-gdal (if you are using python 3)

You can confirm by typing in gdalinfo --version or ogrinfo on your terminal.

If you visit the UbuntuGIS-Stable PPA, you can see a number of other useful spatial libraries that can be installed in the similar manner mentioned above.

Happy GIS!