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Ubuntu 15.10 'Wily Werewolf' Released (omgubuntu.co.uk)
LichtSpektren writes: Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" is now released and available, along with its alternative desktop flavors (MATE, Xfce, LXDE, GNOME, KDE, Kylin). This release features Linux 4.2, GCC 5, Python 3.5, and LibreOffice 5. The default version is still using X.org display server and Unity7; Mark Shuttleworth has said that Mir and Unity8 won't arrive until Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus." Not much has changed beyond package updates, other than replacing the invisible overlay scrollbars in Nautilus with the GNOME 3 scrollbars.
Phoronix brings us the only bit of drama regarding this release: Jonathan Riddell, long time overseer of Kubuntu, has resigned with claims that Canonical has "defrauded donors and broke the copyright licenses." Another reader adds a link to a Q & A session with Riddell.
Phoronix brings us the only bit of drama regarding this release: Jonathan Riddell, long time overseer of Kubuntu, has resigned with claims that Canonical has "defrauded donors and broke the copyright licenses." Another reader adds a link to a Q & A session with Riddell.
Speaking as a user of Ubuntu MATE: It has the best hardware support of any distro I have ever used, it has the best selection of default software (except that obnoxious GNOME Keyring/Seahorse, which I replace with KeePass X). I have not had any problems with PulseAudio, NetworkManager, or systemd.
Mint is about just as good honestly, so if you have some moral qualms against Canonical (e.g. because of the Amazon search plug-in), it's a perfectly viable alternative. Fedora is too crashy for me to use--that's just my experience. I like Debian a lot, but I have to fiddle with the defaults far too much for my taste (I give lots of Ubuntu MATE USBs to my friends and co-workers to try out, it's a lot more user friendly than Debian is).
You must not have been paying attention ~10 years ago. Ubuntu rose to #1 because they put an emphasis on easy installation, and achieved it at a time when all the other distros were broken in one way or another. Back then, installing Linux was always a bit of a chore; there was always something broken that you'd have to go manually fix, which of course dissuaded most casual users who weren't familiar with the Unix command line, manually installing device drivers, editing your "easy to manage config files" with vi, etc.
Ubuntu came along and managed to make an installer that really worked, and a casual user could pop into a CD drive and install without any command-line intervention. The rest was history.
Of course, other distros finally caught up mostly, but Ubuntu was the first one there.
Of course, that was long before they came up with crap like Unity, the Amazon lens, etc., and this was also well before Mint came along, since Mint is itself an Ubuntu derivative.
My advice: if you want an easy-to-install distro where you don't have to screw around with stuff, and want a sane though more traditional UI, just pick any one of the Mint flavors. I like the KDE one personally, but the others all have their fans too and seem to be good. All of them have more traditional UIs, and haven't gone for the radical new UI concepts seen in Gnome3, Unity, Windows8+, etc. The whole reason Mint is so popular now is because of Unity; before that, Mint was a tiny derivative of Ubuntu, but then Unity and Gnome3 both came out and pissed everyone off, and Mint launched two projects that were Gnome2 derivatives, and tons of users switched from Ubuntu to Mint in response.