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Ubuntu 15.10 'Wily Werewolf' Released (omgubuntu.co.uk)

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

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.

35 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Ugh by metrix007 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I never liked Ubuntu. I cam from Slackware and it always left a horrible taste in my mouth.

    Cutting edge, poorly tested software like PulseAudio was included in a desperate attempt to keep up with windows, and easy to manage config files was replaced with junk like NetworkManager..and then Unity happened.

    How is it these days? Better? How does it compare to Mint or Fedora or Debian? How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?

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    1. Re:Ugh by metrix007 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I cam from Slackware and it always left a horrible taste in my mouth

      Sigh...phrasing Lana!

      --
      If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
    2. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?"

      That's easy. Millennial valley hipsters + money.

    3. Re:Ugh by LichtSpektren · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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).

    4. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?

      It was (and still is) dead-easy to install. Even the first iteration had an extremely streamlined installation-process (the less questions you ask, the easier the process) and stellar hardware auto-detection. Coupled with one-click download of non-free drivers it is pretty obvious why Ubuntu became the mainstream-linux.

    5. Re:Ugh by LichtSpektren · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I don't use Ubuntu because it's cool, I use it because it allows me to get my work done. I'm sure Fedora is perfect for its users, but in my experience it's less stable.

    6. Re:Ugh by Grishnakh · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?

      People like yourself who seem to think that Linux has to be hard to use or else it's not cool.

    8. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I prefer Windows 10. It fully supports any hardware and it offers free updates. It's rock solid and all my software just works. The amount of time horsing around with teh OS I've saved would pay the cost of the OS 50x over.

    9. Re:Ugh by LichtSpektren · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Mint is superior to Ubuntu in many ways. The only reason I prefer Ubuntu MATE to Mint MATE is because of the automatic security updates and backup tools, which are more convenient for when I install Linux on my co-workers' or friends' computers.

    10. Re:Ugh by reiscw · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I run Ubuntu on a desktop and four laptops (two ThinkPads, an Inspiron, and an older HP G60). I upgraded them all yesterday to 15.10. It has gotten a lot more stable lately (15.04/15.10). It used to be that when I ran it (back it the 13.04 / 13.10 / 14.10 non-LTS releases) that you'd get a lot of random crashes ("your system has encountered a problem"). With the 4.2 kernel and the bug fixes they've been putting into Unity it works pretty well. I'm not a full-time developer (a math / cs teacher), but I like Unity. I like being able to do super+F to search files, super+A to search applications. It is a very keyboard friendly interface (at least to me it is).
       
      The other thing that makes it better (again, to me) than Gnome 3.14/3.16/3.18 is that it also utilizes space better (no annoying title bars, and integrating application menus into the top panel is also nice). I used to run Debian (stable) for stability but now that Ubuntu is getting more and more stable (and frankly, more stable in my opinion than Cinnamon on Mint) I've moved pretty much full time to Ubuntu.

    11. Re:Ugh by fnj · · Score: 2

      Cutting edge, poorly tested software like PulseAudio was included in a desperate attempt to keep up with windows, and easy to manage config files was replaced with junk like NetworkManager..and then Unity happened.

      None of that crap has anything whatever to do with Ubuntu except Unity. PulseAudio and NetworkManager (systemd too) are in just about all the distros - certainly in Fedora and RHEL. In fact they were pushed on all of us by Red Hat, with all of the distros falling over themselves panting to adopt them, eyes blazing with faith in the Master.

    12. Re:Ugh by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 2

      How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?

      This is sort of a strange way to phrase this, considering that Mint is built on top of Ubuntu (except for the newer Debian edition) . It's basically Ubuntu with a more traditional desktop and a few additional utilities. Canonical hasn't always make the best decisions, in many people's opinion, but you can give them a lot of credit, especially early on, by helping to popularize a very "friendly" version of Linux on the desktop.

      --
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    13. Re:Ugh by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's pretty straightforward. Ubuntu "just works". And it "just works" in part because of the stuff you denounce, like PulseAudio and NetworkManager, neither of which are perfect, but they are designed to ensure that people don't have to "manage" (easily or not) a bunch of config files.

      Ubuntu isn't the only distribution with those technologies BTW, but it was the first to really polish and test the hell out of the combined, modern, GNOME/GNU/Linux system to produce something that would produce a usable installation out of the box on almost everything.

      Is it perfect? No. Unity was brave but not something anyone is particularly happy with. I'm dreading the Mir/Wayland BS foreshadowed in the summary above. But before Unity, for the longest time, a GNU/Linux based software distribution was the second easiest to use operating system out there (after Mac OS X), and arguably the most productive of the big three. That's why it's popular.

      --
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    14. Re:Ugh by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      Begs the question: "In Many Ways"? What ways? Is the Gnome3 shell more up-to-date and running on Wayland?

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    15. Re:Ugh by jedidiah · · Score: 2

      Pulseaudio really has SQUAT to do with "ease of configuration". That already existed with ALSA. What pulseaudio added was "features" that ALSA didn't have.

      Ubuntu (and the rest) "just worked" fine before pulseaudio. If anything, adopting pulse too quickly caused Ubuntu to "not just work" anymore for a lot of people. It still has a bad reputation because of this.

      People are choosing to have selective amnesia when it comes to Ubuntu+pulse now.

      It's the same amnesia that cause people to pretend that Ubuntu is something special.

      --
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    16. Re:Ugh by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 3, Informative

      Ubuntu, in the early days, was Debian made easy. You could download and install an early Ubuntu release in about the same time it took you to decide which Debian CDs you needed, and what you probably wanted to install. Of course, for experienced Debian users, Ubuntu offered little new. However, it made the system accessible to the masses.

    17. Re:Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I actually ditched Windows completely due to better hardware support on Linux, better install and upgrades, better privacy, better control and better overall experience. Gaming is great on Steam and Netflix is supported on Chrome Browser. The amount of fiddling on Ubuntu is minimal, but still there (still had to download graphics-drivers manually to get it to work), however, is nothing compared to all the fiddling I'd have to do on Windows and still not be happy / in control.

      Best of luck, whatever W10 will become. I'll keep my W7 inside VirtualBox, for special applications only use. Works for me. Happy that W10 works for you.

    18. Re:Ugh by cdwiegand · · Score: 4, Informative

      Also Ubuntu was vastly more up to date than Debian, which always was running 2+ years old libraries. Great for long term servers, not great for cutting edge development and deployments.

      --
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    19. Re:Ugh by smooth+wombat · · Score: 2

      The phrase you were looking was: Raises the question.

      --
      We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
    20. Re:Ugh by alexgieg · · Score: 2

      OS X is not easy to use. It's counter-intuitive as hell.

      It depends on your background. If you already know a UI, switching to another one will feel annoying and counterintuitive unless the new one works almost exactly like the first. But I remember reading that complete computer illiterate beginners, including small children, get up to speed in Mac OS X's UI in less time than they do in other UIs. If that's accurate, the claim that Mac OS X is in general more intuitive would be correct.

      --
      Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
    21. Re:Ugh by serviscope_minor · · Score: 2

      How does ALSA deal with hotplugging?

      Pulse Audio has kinda-sorta lumbered into a working position now. I mean sure, on one machine I had to compile a newer version from the source because if the volume was too loud it would flip to headphones at random, and sometimes just rapidly flip back and forth. And on the other machine I have to kill it every so often because the sound gets corrupt.

      But 99% of the time it works.

      Oh and this is the message you get when you try to download it:

      Typically PulseAudio would be provided by your OS distribution. As PulseAudio forms part of what is typically preferred to as the plumbing layer of Linux userspace, it is a non-trivial job to integrate it fully to form a complete system. This is why we strongly encourage you to go via your distribution whenever possible.

      Fuck you Pulse Audio team. When the hell did linux become "it's a black box don't touch it" instead of "here's the source, go nuts and submit a patch".

      The rot is really setting into the community it seems.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    22. Re:Ugh by LichtSpektren · · Score: 2

      In my time of using Ubuntu (every version since 14.04), the only technical problems I suffered were some glitches with Unity (that has since been avoided because I moved to MATE). I've tried both Fedora 21 and 22 and both of them would terminally crash on me; if I had cared enough to force it to work, maybe I could've fixed it, but what's the point when Ubuntu works perfect for me out of the box? So your claim that "Fedora is always more stable than Ubuntu" is demonstrably false in my case.

      In regards to CentOS: it's worked fairly well for me in my experience. But there's four reasons I prefer Ubuntu. The first is that enabling automatic security updates, the firewall, and the scheduled backup takes about two minutes total in Ubuntu, so it's much faster and easier to install it on my friends' and co-workers' computers. Plus these tools all have an extremely rudimentary GUI (Software Updater, gufw, and Deja Dup respectively), so it's easier to manage for those people that are not technically saavy. The second reason I prefer Ubuntu is because it supports MATE out of the box, which is superior in many ways to GNOME fallback mode in CentOS. The third reason is because Ubuntu has broader hardware support; correct me if I'm wrong, but CentOS does not yet support UEFI boot, does it? I would have to roll my own kernel to a newer version. The Ubuntu family has better driver support in any case. And the fourth reason is because my friends and co-workers want to use MP3s, DVDs, TrueType fonts, Flash and Java, which can all be enabled out of the box from an Ubuntu install, whereas you have to know how to hack in support when using CentOS.

    23. Re:Ugh by Beat+The+Odds · · Score: 2

      The single best feature of Ubuntu is apt-get and that's something that Ubuntu stole from Debian.

      They didn't "steal" anything. Ubuntu is based on Debian.

      You know, Open Source.

    24. Re:Ugh by nickweller · · Score: 2

      @metrix007: "How did it become the only real viable desktop distro aside from maybe Mint?"

      The large userbase, works best out of the box, installing/upgrading can't be any easier using Synaptic and you've got a choice of desktops.

  2. The suspense is killing me! by Gaygirlie · · Score: 3, Funny

    Will "do-release-upgrade" manage to update the machine this time around without breaking Grub or anything else? Anyone wanna place bets?

  3. So what does it change into during a full moon? by sims+2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Windows?

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  4. Ubuntu with tweaks by iTrawl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Installing cairo-dock, and, optionally, running xfwm4 as the WM, makes Ubuntu actually very usable in my case. Greased lightning usable. And cairo-dock even has some bling thrown in! It put it to the left and made it autohide, so it kind of looks like Unity when in use.

    I like Unity's menu-in-titlebar feature. I lose that with cairo-dock, but that's compensated by not having a gnome-style top bar - well... you do, but it goes under the applications and comes up when you hover the clock (which overlays a small part of the titlebar (when application is maximised) that is otherwise useless anyway).

    The root of my preferences lies in this need: as much space for _my_ application and as little as possible for the OS, but easily accessible when I need its functions, without running any occult desktop environments :)

    --
    "Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
  5. Re:Scamonical by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They aren't. Riddell has had a bug up is his ass since Canonical made Kubuntu an entirely community supported distribution and laid him off as the sole employee who worked on it. Ever since then, he whines like a spoiled brat about Canonical every time he doesn't get his way about some trivial shit. One example of his childish behavior was the crying about Canonical not rubberstamping an expense for some pizza for some hackathon event for Kubuntu. He wanted blank check approval for the expense before the event, and Canonical told him to submit a expense request afterwards and they'll pay it then. Of course, since he works for another company he could easily asked them to provide the funds for his little pizza soiree and then be compensated by Canonical later, but instead he chose to yell and abuse the Ubuntu Community Council because he still hasn't got over his butthurt at being let go. Kubuntu is going to be just fine. In fact, it'll be better off without that fucker.

  6. ubuntu's side of the story, re: jonathan riddell by dmoen · · Score: 5, Informative

    https://web.archive.org/web/20150618010547/http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2015/05/29/community-council-statement-jonathan-riddell/

    I'm not taking sides, just providing extra information that's not in the original post.

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  7. Better HW support in Linux: desktop or laptop? by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I actually ditched Windows completely due to better hardware support on Linux

    For desktops or laptops? GNU/Linux seems to support desktop hardware fine, but lately, Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better. I've been having trouble finding an 11.6 inch or smaller laptop that works well with GNU/Linux.*

    The amount of fiddling on Ubuntu is minimal, but still there (still had to download graphics-drivers manually to get it to work), however, is nothing compared to all the fiddling I'd have to do on Windows and still not be happy / in control.

    On a few laptops such as the EeeBook, volunteers for the DebianOn project couldn't get sound, Wi-Fi, or suspend working at all. Should I instead ask on Ubuntu Forums for what small laptops sold now work well with Xubuntu 15.xx?

    * By "works well", I include at least graphics, multi-window window management, audio, Wi-Fi, suspend, and a bootloader that doesn't beg the user to wipe the drive every time it is turned on the way a Chromebook with Crouton does.

    1. Re: Better HW support in Linux: desktop or laptop? by tepples · · Score: 2

      Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better

      Get a [...] MacBook Air

      For three times the price. That just supports Windows fans' "Windows is more affordable than UNIX" canard.

    2. Re:Better HW support in Linux: desktop or laptop? by shellbeach · · Score: 2

      For desktops or laptops? GNU/Linux seems to support desktop hardware fine, but lately, Windows supports small (10.1" or 11.6") laptop hardware better. I've been having trouble finding an 11.6 inch or smaller laptop that works well with GNU/Linux.*

      You mentioned chromebooks with crouton, but I've got perfect hardware support for two chromebooks (Dell Chromebook 11 and Toshiba Chromebook 2 13") running Ubuntu natively (no useless ChromeOS is present on either chromebook). (The great John Lewis has a simple script to rewrite the bios and bootloader; I highly recommend it). Hardware support was flaky a year ago, but since 15.04 it's been pretty much native support out of the box (the only exception being the Toshiba's microphone, which should be fixed in 15.10 with kernel 4.2).

      The end result is a very cheap, light and functional linux laptop. I'd especially recommend the Chromebook 2 -- the screen on that thing is amazing.

  8. Re:After Z it wraps back to A. by tadas · · Score: 2

    I kinda wish they'd called this release "Wascally Wabbit".

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  9. LMDE still systemd free by walterbyrd · · Score: 3, Informative

    Systemd Will Be Adopted Starting With Linux Mint 18 And LMDE 3
    http://linuxg.net/systemd-will-be-adopted-starting-with-linux-mint-18-and-lmde-3/

    Still able to avoid that awful crap for another few years.