There’s a new Ubuntu in town, Ubuntu Linux 21.10.
First things first. An Indri, aka a Babakoto, is a very large lemur. Ubuntu 21.10, Impish Indri, is Canonical ’s latest Ubuntu Linux release. It’s the short-term — nine months of support — predecessor to the company’s next long-term support (LTS) version, Ubuntu 22.04. As such, while we usually think of Ubuntu as a desktop Linux distribution, it’s far more than that. As Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical and Ubuntu’s founder says, „We aim to bring Ubuntu to all the corners of the enterprise and all the places developers want to innovate. That goes from „the biggest public clouds to the tiniest devices, from [Nvidia] DGX servers to Windows WSL [Windows Subsystem for Linux] workstations, open source is the springboard for new ideas and Ubuntu makes that springboard safe, secure and consistent.“ On the desktop, the new Ubuntu default interface is GNOME 40. While you can use the brand-spanking-new GNOME 41, that’s not the interface 21.10 comes with. Still, a few GNOME 41 apps such as Calendar app, GNOME Disk Utility, Eye of GNOME (aka Image Viewer), and GNOME System Monitor have made it into this new Ubuntu. In addition, there are some changes from vanilla GNOME 40. The Ubuntu 21.10 version still comes with the handy Ubuntu Dock on your display’s left side. Ubuntu Dock also now comes with a persistent trash can icon, USB drive shortcuts, and a separator between pinned and running apps. All-in-all I like this new look. There are, of course, other desktop choices for the latest Ubuntu. The most mature of these to date appear to be Cinnamon and the old Ubuntu Unity interface, which lives on as an independent project. Other desktops, such as KDE, Kubuntu, and Xfce, Xubuntu, will be out for 21.
