14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) has finally arrived in its stable form, but don't expect to see too much on the desktop side. This new release of Ubuntu has a lot more changes and features on the cloud and server side of things.
It was already known that Ubuntu 15.10 won't be a really impressive release for the desktop fans, so it's not going to be a terrible surprise. The one thing that would definitely be noticed by the Ubuntu users is the new Unity 8, but that's still not ready for prime time. For now, Unity 7 reigns supreme and Canonical continues to improve it and to keep it up to date. It's true that most of the changes made to Ubuntu 15.10 are under the hood, but the overall experience should be a better one.
The Ubuntu 15.10 release can be separated into a few categories, as Canonical has expanded in quite a few markets and niches. It used to have pretty much only the desktop and the server versions, but that's no longer the case. They are now covering IoT devices with their Ubuntu Snappy Core, the cloud, and the phone. It's getting more and more difficult to decide what's more important, so we'll start with the regular desktop users.
Ubuntu 15.10 for the desktop
We wrote about all the major changes that have been implemented in Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) a while back. Here is a rundown of the most important new features and improvements. The system ships with Linux kernel 4.2, OpenStack 2015.2.0 will be available as well, stateless persistent network interface names are now being used, most of the GNOME packages have been upgraded to version 3.16.X, GCC 5 and Python 3.x have been implemented as well, and the upstream GNOME scrollbars are now being used.
"In 15.10, Unity8 is demonstrating Canonical’s convergence vision as a tech preview. Users can log into a Unity8 session on the desktop, experience the new features, and cleanly revert to the default Unity7 experience. The feature set of Unity8 now includes the important windowed mode for Desktop users, which allows users to multi-task between multiple running apps. Mobile apps such as the Music player and the Deko email client have added support to cover small form-factor devices and large screen Desktops. Ubuntu 15.10 also has improved supports for developers of traditional apps that want to bring these apps into Unity8," say the Ubuntu developers.
Ubuntu Snappy Core is becoming more relevant
This new flavor of Ubuntu is a small and modular new version of the OS that is designed to work with IoT devices. It uses "Snappy" packages, which come with a transactional update and rollback system for apps and the OS itself. Also, a couple of months ago a new tool called Snapcraft that allows developers to easily create new "Snap" packages has been released as well.
Cloud and Server side
If you like Ubuntu for its server capabilities, you'll be happy to now that Canonical’s OpenStack Autopilot, the fastest and easiest way to build an Ubuntu OpenStack cloud, has been made available, the LXD machine containers have been updated to support Ubuntu, CentOS and other Linux guests, the nova-compute-lxd OpenStack driver for machine containers is now available as a tech preview, and DPDK fast network packet processing packaged and ready for testing.
"Ubuntu Server 15.10 ships with a v4.2 based Linux kernel, enabling the latest server hardware and peripherals available from IBM, HP, Dell, and Intel. The 15.10 kernel delivers new features inherited from upstream such as ACPI support for ARM, LSM (Linux Security Module) Stacking, and the new thermal Power Allocator governor. We also see notable Ubuntu specific achievements with fan networking for network address space expansion capability and also the introduction of a DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) tech preview for faster packet processing in network-heavy applications," is also noted in Canonical's announcement.
As usual, you can download the latest version of Ubuntu 15.10 right now from Softpedia (the desktop flavor) and give it a spin. Don't worry if you don't see the announcement just yet on their website. They usually release the ISO images before that happens.
