The Exciting Ubuntu 15.10 Linux News Of The Past Week

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 10 May 2015 at 10:22 AM EDT. 1 Comment
UBUNTU
With Canonical having hosted the Ubuntu Online Summit this past week to lay out and plan early details of Ubuntu 15.10, here's a recap of our Phoronix coverage over the past week for their next major update due to ship in October.

The Ubuntu Online Summit was once again kicked off by Mark Shuttleworth's keynote. During Mark's keynote he shared Ubuntu 15.10 is codenamed the Wily Werewolf. Mark also shared there will be a new Ubuntu Phone shipping this year to provide a converged experience where you have a Unity desktop experience when connecting the phone to a monitor, etc.

One of the biggest focal points of this UOS for Ubuntu 15.10 was devising plans for Ubuntu Snappy, the new package management solution that's planned to eventually replace Debian packages across the Ubuntu spectrum. Ubuntu Snappy has a lot of features thought of but it will be a long road before they fully replace .deb files on the Ubuntu desktop. One of the interesting features being worked on for Snappy is deduplication support. Even once snaps start appearing on the desktop, .deb files will be offerd for the "foreseeable future".

Another big focus is, of course, Ubuntu Phone/Touch. Those with devices running the mobile version of Ubuntu can expect to see many Ubuntu Phone updates coming soon. There's still no word though when the Meizu MX4 with Ubuntu will begin to ship. This mobile incarnation of Ubuntu is also making progress on switching to systemd. Some versions of Ubuntu are also brewing plans to switch to using systemd's networkd.

Rounding out the big ticket items for Ubuntu 15.10/16.04 development is Unity 8. For Unity 8 on the desktop, many features are being tackled. There was also a demo of Ubuntu's Unity 8 on the desktop with Mir.

Ubuntu 15.10 will ship with the GCC 5 compiler by default. Ubuntu 15.10 or 16.04 will also be the first in the Ubuntu family defaulting to Python 3 on the installation media with Python 2 finally being on the way out the door.

The Xubuntu Team this past week announced Xubuntu Core, but it's not to be confused with Ubuntu Core. Xubuntu Core is just a lightweight Xfce desktop experience without a lot of the extra packages found in the standard Xubuntu ISOs. The Lubuntu flavor of Ubuntu meanwhile is working on switching to LXQt rather than LXDE as its desktop base. Ubuntu MATE is also in good standing as talked about on Phoronix a few days back.

Well, those were my highlights for the UOS summit that concluded on Thursday. If I missed anything else interesting during the many sessions, feel free to comment on this article via our forums.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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