Ubuntu continues with its slow and unstoppable step to conquer the world, and it does so with version of Ubuntu 21.10, Impish Indri, predecessor of the long-awaited Ubuntu 22.04 that will arrive in about 9 months.
We are talking about a desktop Linux distribution that has managed to reach places where others have not, from grandma’s computer to development stations, public clouds or even Windows WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) workstations.
Ubuntu’s new default interface is GNOME 40, although there are some GNOME 41 applications that can already be used, such as Calendar, GNOME Disk Utility, Image Viewer, and the GNOME System Monitor. It is also possible to install GNOME 41 completely, if desired.
It arrives with Ubuntu Dock on the left side, with a trash can icon, USB drive shortcuts, and a separator between pinned and running apps.
Cinnamon and the old Ubuntu Unity interface can also be installed, and it will be possible to put KDE, Kubuntu and Xfce shortly.
In terms of programs, it includes the LibreOffice 7.2 office suite, the Thunderbird 91 email client and the Firefox 92 web browser.
For developers it includes PHP 8 and GCC 11 with better support for static analysis, making life easier for low-level C and C ++ programmers.
Ubuntu 21.10 also offers an instant package for Apache Cassandra, an open source NoSQL distributed database.
There are also special resources for DevOps developers and LTS Docker images including Grafana, Prometheus, and NGINX.
In the official note they have other news for those who are dedicated to the development of applications and web projects:
Apache Cassandra v4 is a new addition, with real-time scraping, alerts, and improved Prometheus integration. Squid, a caching proxy, and Bind9, a full-featured DNS system.
All this under the Linux kernel 5.13 that includes a new high performance runtime memory error detector.
For non-developer users they have thought of a more friendly interface for Windows users. WSL 2.0 is now compatible with Ubuntu graphical applications.
Ubuntu 21.10 is now available for download for 64-bit systems. You can see the details in this link.