What’s new Werewolf?
Drum roll, please. Ubuntu 15.10 entrance, stage left.
Ubuntu has a reputation of living on the bleeding edge and introducing new and revolutionary changes, especially with its non-LTS releases. However, the changes in Ubuntu 15.10 are pretty much incremental in nature, which is good news for users that prefer stability and consistency.
Unity 7, the last release of Ubuntu’s controversial desktop is essentially in maintenance mode while the developers focus their full attention on Unity 8 which is slated for debut in the 16.04 release. While the user interface engine isn’t much more than a bug fix release, the distribution (distro) is shipping the Mesa 11 graphics library, which is notable for bringing OpenGL 4.1 support to RadeonSI and Nouveau drivers. The release also switches the Gnome stack to v3.16 for a majority of the components while some, such as the Nautilus file manager, are still using a heavily patched version of the older v3.14 release.
The changes
Ubuntu 15.10 ships with a customised Ubuntu Linux kernel 4.2.0-11 based on the upstream 4.2.1 Linux kernel. This
“The only real visible change in Ubuntu 15.10 is the switch to Gnome’s scrollbars.”
release supports: the new AMD GPU driver; per-file encryption for the F2FS (Flash-friendly file system); NCQ TRIM handling for improved support for SSDs and several other improvements. One important semi-visible change in the release is the switch to stateless persistent network interface names. This means that instead of labels like eth0 and eth1 network interfaces will have more comprehensive names, such as enp0s3 and enp0s8. Furthermore, for added consistency, these names will be attached to the particular interfaces even after you restart the machine or remove the hardware.
The only real visible change in Ubuntu 15.10 is the switch to Gnome’s scrollbars. Canonical’s idea was to have scrollbars that didn’t take up a lot of screen space, and only showed up when they were needed. It was a good idea poorly implemented. After a constant barrage of complaints, Ubuntu dropped them in favour of traditional scrollbars from the upstream Gnome.
Also the option to enable locally integrated menus was made available in the last release. However, the menus were only displayed for the active window. In 15.10, the menus are also available for unfocused windows.