Distributions

What's new in Ubuntu 15.10

Ubuntu 15.10 ("Wily Werewolf") was released on October 22. As is increasingly the case for established distributions, the updates incorporated into the new release are largely incremental improvements over what shipped in the last cycle. Users will not see drastic changes to the desktop environment or core applications. But there are several important updates to be found, particularly for administrators of Ubuntu cloud instances and those following the progress of Ubuntu's "convergence" effort to deploy the same software stack on desktops and mobile devices.

First, the basics. Ubuntu 15.10 ships with kernel 4.2, which as of release time was the most current stable kernel. The 15.10 release notes highlight a handful of new kernel features included, such as support for the Flash-Friendly File System (F2FS) and for non-volatile memory devices. In addition, this is the first Ubuntu release to feature a kernel build targeting the Raspberry Pi 2. Users will also want to be aware that the new release adopts systemd's persistent network interface naming scheme. While the new, stable names should work out of the box on new installs, users upgrading from older releases would be wise to double-check any local or third-party scripts that might still have references to the old interface-naming approach.

Among the other system components included in the new release, Ubuntu 15.10 switches its default compiler to GCC 5. It also includes Python 3.5, although earlier reports that the 15.10 release would migrate entirely to Python 3 appear not to have panned out. The project wiki now proposes making 16.04 the first "pure Python 3" release.

Desktops (and devices)

The distribution is not quite as current on application frameworks as it is on the kernel, though. The majority of GNOME and GTK+ components included in 15.10 are from the GNOME 3.16 release in March. 3.18, for comparison, was released in September, and has yet to ship in a major distribution release, although that lag time is a longstanding issue with the distribution community. The two notable exceptions to the GNOME 3.16 platform are the Nautilus file manager and Gedit text editor; Ubuntu maintains patched versions of older releases of these projects (3.14 for Nautilus and 3.10 for Gedit) in order to support features that were subsequently removed from the upstream releases.

On the other hand, Ubuntu 15.10 does add support for GTK+ 3.16's newly-added overlay scrollbars. Prior Ubuntu releases had included a separate overlay-scrollbar implementation that debuted with Ubuntu 11.10. The goal of both overlay-scrollbar projects is to maximize usable screen real estate by allowing application scrollbars to fade out when not needed and only appear on screen when the cursor approaches the window edge. There are still other differences between Ubuntu and vanilla GNOME components, such as Ubuntu's inclusion of the Blueman Bluetooth-management utility (which was updated to a new major release: version 2.0, which supports BlueZ 5.35) rather than GNOME Bluetooth.

As for desktop shells, 15.10 again sticks with the existing Unity 7 environment, although there are a number of noteworthy improvements. There are multiple improvements to keyboard-based navigation (particularly in the Dash overlay used to search for and open applications and files), drag-and-drop is now supported between the Dash and other desktop elements, and a fix was added that prevents someone (including a hostile attacker) from initiating a system shutdown while the screen is locked. Finally, Unity 7's locally integrated menus (which appear in the header bar of an application window) are now visible all the time, even when the window does not have focus.

Although Unity 7 remains the default, Unity 8 (which is the next generation of the shell already in use in Ubuntu Phone) has also received updates in the new release, some of which are significant. The plan for Unity 8 has always been that the shell would run on both desktop systems and mobile devices; the biggest news in the 15.10 release is that this is now a real possibility—or at least a real enough possibility for users to put to the test. Unity 8 now officially supports a multi-window "desktop" mode, and the core set of Ubuntu Phone apps can now run in windowed mode (as opposed to full-screen-only mode in previous releases) on the desktop. The 15.10 release is also the first to support over-the-air updates to Ubuntu Phone. Reports are that Unity 8 may become the default desktop environment in the 16.04 release, although that may still depend on the results of testing.

Other changes of interest to desktop users include updates to the usual suite of applications (such as LibreOffice 5.02, Firefox 41, and Chromium 45), and support for Valve's "Steam Controller" gaming peripheral.

Server and cloud

Ubuntu's server and cloud offerings were also updated in the 15.10 release. The supported version of OpenStack was bumped up to the Liberty edition (released on October 15). Both Ceph (version 0.94.3) and OpenStack Swift (version 2.5.0) are supported as storage back-ends.

Canonical has launched an OpenStack deployment service called Autopilot in conjunction with the new release, and the MAAS (for Metal as a Service) package that underlies Autopilot has been updated. Juju, the service-orchestration tool, has been updated to version 1.24.6.

Other updated server components include libvirt (to version 1.2.16), Open vSwitch (to 2.4.0), and the OpenDaylight software-defined networking (SDN) controller. The LXD hypervisor is now included in the server image by default, and a "tech preview" of the LXD driver for OpenStack Nova is available (although not included on the default image).

Similarly, 15.10's Open vSwitch package can be used with a "preview" version of the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). It enables Open vSwitch switches to do user-space packet processing, which is expected to provide noticeably better performance.

At the low end of the hardware spectrum, the new release also includes updated tools for developers building software for Ubuntu Core—the minimalist image that supports transactional software updates. Ubuntu Core is targeted at appliance projects, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and robotics. The new development tool chain is called Snapcraft, in reference to the snap package format used in Ubuntu Core.

As the plethora of version numbers in the preceding text may suggest, the 15.10 update is largely an incremental step forward for Ubuntu. That is nothing to bemoan, of course. Particularly when it comes to relatively recent areas of OS development like transactional updates and software-defined networking, stable, incremental updates are a positive sign that the platform is maturing.

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to watch where some of the updates head over the six months between now and the next Ubuntu release. Some users have been waiting quite a while to see the converged-phone-and-desktop interface of Unity 8, for instance. Others may be looking forward to a distribution that uses Python 3 by default. Both may have seemed like distant possibilities at one time; now, perhaps, they may both be within reach of another incremental distribution update.

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