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Ubuntu 16.10 To Be Powered By Linux Kernel 4.8 (softpedia.com)
Reader prisoninmate shares a Softpedia report: We've been monitoring the Ubuntu 16.10 development cycle for quite some time now to see what Linux kernel version the upcoming GNU/Linux operating system will be based on, and for now, it remains powered by the same kernel packages as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus). Also, it looks like Ubuntu 16.10 has been switched to a universal local DNS resolver service. However, the Ubuntu Kernel Team published the other day a new installation of their weekly newsletter, informing the community that Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) would soon be rebased on the latest stable Linux 4.6 kernels. Then, it will move to the Release Candidate builds of Linux kernel 4.7, and after that, the operating system will finally be switched to Linux kernel 4.8.
why is this news?
Be or ben't
Just told my Grandmother the great news. She can't wait to try this out!
Those distros you mention are not replacements for modern, mainstream distros like Debian or Ubuntu in any way.
Slackware is ancient, and requires far too much work to get it reasonably usable. Maybe it's good if you're a hobbyist Linux user who likes to tinker on the weekend, but Slackware is just not an option for anyone who needs to get real work done quickly.
Gentoo isn't much better than Slackware. Its compilation approach isn't an option for most people, too. They don't want to wait minutes, hours or even days before they can start using software. They don't want to pay for the electricity needed to power the compilation. They don't want the extra wear-and-tear on their hardware.
CRUX is a niche distro. Niche distros aren't an option because they can be much harder to get support from when things go wrong, there's much less of a guarantee that security issues will be found and fixed promptly, and the long-term viability of these distros is very questionable. When there are only one to three people working on a distro, it's a huge risk to use it for anything serious.
Devuan is a fucking joke. I followed its early development, and the first few months were a lot of infighting. Certain factions would accuse others of being "systemd trolls" and nonsense like that. Debian, even with systemd, is still far better than Devuan is. Of the options you listed, Devuan is by far the worst.
While the shitty niche distros you mention aren't viable replacements for real Linux distros, it turns out that FreeBSD is actually an excellent replacement. It has a large user community. It has responsible and responsive developers, and frequent maintenance and releases.
We aren't seeing Linux users moving the shitty alternatives that you proposed. We're seeing them abandon Linux altogether, and moving their systems over to FreeBSD! That should scare the living hell out of the Linux community. It's losing some of its best users, administrators and developers to FreeBSD. Over the long run, this can be a disaster. These are the kinds of users that the Linux community needs to keep if it wishes to remain viable.
I hate to break it to you, but the code-naming convention is nothing specific to Ubuntu, they just get slightly more silly about it with their alliteration, and the names are more user-visible, which isn't surprising considering there's a whole lot more overlap between the user and development base. I do wish fewer people would use them though, the version number is far more concise and informative. But then I wish the same thing about OS X and its silly cat names - Is Panther newer or older than Leopard, and where does Lion fit into things? At least with Ubuntu the code names are in alphabetical order.
It's not limited to the "cute" OSes either. Perhaps you've used a few of: Sparta, Snowball, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, Millenium, Razzle, Wolfpack, Whistler, Freestyle, Longhorn, Blackcomb, Blue, and Threshold. All versions of Windows, though at least they have the good taste not to put the name on the box.
As for the configuration files - I hate to break it to you, but Windows and OS X do the same thing. They just don't publicize it, so if you don't see an option you tend to assume it doesn't exist. There's a LOT of extra options in both that you can only modify by directly editing configuration files or the registry. If you've never run into a problem that can only be solved by serious registry editing consider yourself lucky. Or unlucky, if you resorted to reinstalling windows from scratch instead.
Where the command line is concerned, it's usually not that common settings can't be changed through the GUI, it's just that when someone asks for help, it's much easier for an expert to tell them "type these two lines into the terminal and paste the output back here if it doesn't solve the problem" than trying to hand-hold them through navigating the GUI alternative and then try to extract useful information from them afterwards. Just the initial "try this" post will probably be 10x as long, and require walking through the GUI yourself to make sure you don't skip any windows or tab-changes that will confuse the asker. Believe me, that's a headache worth avoiding whenever possible, especially since most askers are terrible at following directions perfectly, just want their problem solved, and won't learn anything useful from the process regardless. If Windows had a similarly powerful and convenient command line you'd see the exact same thing in Windows help forums. That you don't is far more a symptom of Window's anemic command line than a lack of Linux GUI options.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Version 16.1 (Xenial Xerus) kernel 4.8. Non-linux people look at the wide quagmire of distros and are baffled, many interested people who would like a desktop alternative get turned off by the impenetrable complexity
No they don't. They get told Ubuntu or Mint are good and go download it. Then they maybe do or maybe don't. No one sees Linux complexity except for the mythical super ASD who insists that his first foray into Linux should be to google for a list of all distributions.
and holy wars of the community (systemd, whatever the hell that is, I don't give a crap, vi, emacs, etc).
No one outside of Slashdot and the admin forums of a few distros gives a shit about this. You don't see mention of this in the community you got to for help because LibreOffice isn't doing something right.
Then you get to Ubuntu as the one targeting non-linux folks to join up, and are confronted with this BS. Xenial Xerus? Really? You picked a revision number, why add a really stupid moniker to it?
Keep it simple stupid.
I'm going to go with no again. Go to Ubuntu homepage, there's no mention of the version name. Not on their home page, not on the desktop sub page, not on the download page, not during installation, and not when booting.
Linux a pool of contradiction. "We have a GUI as good as Windows/OSX!" But then GUI users are mocked, and frankly the GUI is only half heartedly implemented, sort of a facade. Real work is done at the command line, and important settings are only available by knowing where esoteric files in a variety of scripting languages live that then must be modified using an editor the proudly user surly.
There's nothing contradictory about Linux. No one praises it's GUI. They praise its customisability but that's as far as it goes. As for the "real work". Who's real work? Let me see you use a WYSIWYG word processor on the command line. ... Wait you don't think grandma is trying to setup a LAMP stack on her system do you?
I agree with the sentiment that Linux "went stupid", though we seem to be getting back to a competitive place again, and I understand why it happened.
Basically the existing infrastructure had in many ways been pushed to the limits of what it could achieve. It offered a solid, viable, mature alternative to Windows, but had very little room for further growth - basic design assumptions made a decade before were beginning to present serious challenges to offering further features, especially in the realm of responsive multimedia (I can't tell you the problems I encountered with sound and advanced 3D graphics) and general "bling". Largely irrelevant to serious work, but serious roadblocks to further competition for desktop users with Windows XP and beyond, with it's relatively solid kernel and focus on being multimedia and game friendly. It's important to remember that XP was itself a massive reworking of the Windows system and GUI to shed the limits of it's predecessors, but it benefited from massive corporate coffers that could fund extensive testing and "polish" before deployment. And it still took a few years and a couple major updates before it was really "ready".
Gnome3 and KDE4 were "answers" to the maturity issue. The previous versions were, pretty much, finished. They did pretty much everything well, and had been pushed about as far as they could be without seriously coercing things to do stuff they were never designed for, which makes for unpleasant coding, a major issue when development depends on volunteers. If you were a UI developer there was no longer much more to be enjoyed short of a major infrastructure overhaul to add massive new potential, aka Gnome3 and KDE 4. My only real complaint is that they were adopted as the default by so many major distros while still half-baked - at that point they offered little real benefit to either users or distro developers other than hype and "bling", and cost a great deal in stability and maturity.
SystemD on the other hand promised a huge benefit to distro developers in the form of offloading a whole lot of infrastructure maintenance to a separate project, and (ideally) few user-visible changes. It too was adopted before it was ready, but in that case it was pretty much necessary (assuming the eventual adoption was desired). System infrastructure requires testing across a wide range of hardware, which requires wide deployment. And unlike the GUI, it's too tightly integrated to just be swapped around as desired on a live system.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.