 It happens every 6 months. Every April and every October we get a new release of Ubuntu, and Canonical just recently announced the release of Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed Mantic Minotaur. I'm going to go ahead and download the ISO for Ubuntu 23.10, I'm going to run through a quick installation and do a first look, and I'm going to highlight some of what has changed in this latest release of Ubuntu 23.10. So I've created a virtual machine here, I've given this virtual machine 6 eggs of RAM, I've given it two threads of my 24 thread threadripper CPU. One thing to note about Ubuntu 23.10, this is one of the interim releases of Ubuntu, meaning it's not a long term support release. So the interim releases, you're expected to run for about 6 months, and then 6 months later when the next release of Ubuntu is released, you move to that release of Ubuntu. So you only get up to 9 months of support with the interim releases, so that's something to be aware of should you choose to install 23.10 on physical hardware. So I'm going to go ahead and boot into the live environment and run through an install, and it boots us into a live environment the installer automatically launches for us. This is the new Ubuntu installer, their Flutter based installer that hasn't been around, but for a couple of versions now. In the old days, of course, Ubuntu had the ubiquity installer that they used for many, many years, but they recently created this new installer that does have some interesting features to it. So let's go through it. So first you need to choose your language, English is the default, and that's correct for me, so I'm just going to click next. Next is install Ubuntu or try Ubuntu. So try Ubuntu just closes the installer and you can play around in the live environment. I want to run through a proper installation, so I'll click next, and then we need to choose our keyboard layout. English US is correct for me, so let me go ahead and click next on that. And then finally, I need to choose whether I'm going to be using a wired connection, Ethernet, which in my case is correct, or if I'm going to use Wi-Fi. And then what apps would you like to install to start with? So this is a change, so by default, you now have a default installation that what is essentially the old minimal installation option. So in previous versions of Ubuntu, you had the standard installation that was a full suite of desktop applications, and then you had a separate minimal installation option, which is a bare bones kind of just a few basic apps, but it didn't come with the office suite or the audio player, the video player, your photo manager and all those extra applications. Well the default option now is actually what was the old minimal option. So if you actually want the full suite of applications, you actually need to go and choose full installation. For me, I'm going to choose the default installation, then you have other options, install third party software for graphics and Wi-Fi. So this is proprietary drivers needed for your graphics card. For example, if you have an Nvidia card, you really need to tick that on. If you're doing this on a laptop, you also really need to tick this on because chances are your Wi-Fi chip in your laptop needs a proprietary driver in order to work. So unless you have some reason not to turn that on, pretty much everybody should tick this box. The next option, download and install support for additional media format. So this is proprietary multimedia codecs again, pretty much everybody should tick that on just so you have all the needed multimedia codecs for, you know, Blu-ray playback and things like that. And then go ahead and click the next button. Now we come to the partitioning of our drives. Do we want to erase the disk and just give the entire virtual drive and this virtual machine over to Ubuntu? Yes, that's what I'm going to do. But if you wanted to, you could also choose a manual partitioning option and manually partition the drive yourself. We do have this advanced features option here. And this is new for this version of Ubuntu is they have added back the experimental ZFS option. So if you wanted to use ZFS for your file system, you can. For me, I'm not going to enable that. I'm just going to go with their default, which is the extend for file system. And I'm going to go ahead and click next. Next it's showing me the drive that it's going to partition. It's going to partition VDA is the name of the drive. That's the virtual hard drive in this VM. And you can say it's going to create two partitions VDA one and VDA two VDA one is probably going to be a swap VDA two is the extend for file system, which is mounted to root. So I'm going to go ahead and click the install button. While that's installing, it looks like we can pick our time zone. It is correctly chosen the central time zone in the US for me, probably based off of some geolocation. So I'll click next on that. Then we need to enter our username and password. I'm going to call my user DT. If you want to, you can create a host name for the computer or one is automatically generated for us. I'm going to change that to Ubuntu dash vert for the host name of this computer. And then I want to create a strong and complicated password for my DT user and then confirm the strong and complicated password and then require password to log in. That is ticked on by default. I strongly suggest you leave that ticked on by default. You should always have to enter a password to get into a computer just for privacy reasons. You also have the option to use active directory. I don't know anything about active directory. I'm not going to tick that on. I think that's a windows kind of thing or something. I don't really don't know what active directory is. Kind of a noob in that proprietary Windows software world. Haven't used windows in so many years. Next up, we can go ahead and set our default theme. By default, it's a light theme. I prefer a dark theme. So I'm going to choose the dark theme. We can go ahead and choose our accent color. By default, it's the traditional orange accents that Ubuntu uses. I'll leave that as the default for now. And I'll click next. And you can see it's installing the system. Now, this portion of the installer typically takes about five to 10 minutes on my system. So I'm going to pause the video. I'm going to go grab me a cup of coffee. I'll be back once Ubuntu 23.10 has finished installing. And the installation finished while I was making my cup of coffee. So that was very quick. Probably took about five minutes. I've gone ahead and rebooted the machine to finish the installation. And we come to the login manager. So I'm going to go ahead and click on the DT user. And if I move my head out of the way, we do have the cog wheel down here. And if I click on it, you can see we're using the Ubuntu desktop, which is GNOME on Wayland. That is the default for this interim release, Ubuntu 23.10. But you still have Ubuntu on Xorg as an option if you need it. You may need it, especially if you have an Nvidia card. You may want to choose that option. But Wayland is the default session. Wayland should be fine for me in this VM. So I'm going to go ahead and leave that as little fault. Let me go ahead and enter my super secure password. And we log in to the GNOME 45 desktop environment. We get our welcome screen here, where we can go ahead and connect to various online accounts. So if you have a Google account, a Next Cloud account, or a Microsoft account that you want to go ahead and set up, you can do that for me. I'm going to skip all of that for purposes of this video, especially in this VM. I don't plan on keeping this VM around. You can see right away, we get a pop-up letting us know that there is software updates available for us. So this was just released this morning. That's interesting that there is already an update. That's probably an important update. If it's already being pushed out, that's probably some kind of bug fix that is being pushed right away. I will decline taking that update right now. The next screen here for the welcome app is do you want to send any kind of telemetry information back to canonical? So this is information about your computer that helps them, I guess, improve the quality of Ubuntu and future releases. They just want to know a little bit about the people that are running Ubuntu, right? What kind of hardware, what kind of computers you guys are using? For me, I don't mind sending that information to canonical, so I'll leave that ticked on. If for some reason that you have a problem with that, you can always decline to send that information to them. For me, yeah, I'll send the information. I'm going to click Next, and then Location Services. So do you want to allow apps to determine your geolocation? So some applications want to know exactly where you are in the world, like time zone information, things like that. Do you want to allow that by default that's turned off? If you wanted to tick that on, you of course could. For me, I'll leave that ticked off. I don't need any of my software to actually know where I'm at. So I'll click Next on that, and then this last screen gives us an overview of some of the programs we could go ahead and install from the App Center. Some of this stuff is proprietary software, things like Spotify, Slack, Zoom, Discord, Gitcrack, and these are proprietary pieces of software that are typically not found in like the standard Ubuntu repositories. These are probably going to be installed as snap packages. You also have some very popular free and open source software also listed here, including things like VLC, OBS, ZeroAD, which is my favorite free and open source game, fantastic game. The GIMP is here, and that's the program I use actually to do all the artwork for my YouTube channel, all the thumbnails, the YouTube banner, everything, all of that is made with the GIMP. Right now I'm going to go ahead and just click Done, and we've got a desktop icon here. This is the home icon. It's a little bit out of place being in the center of the screen. I'm going to drag it up to the top left, by the way, and the top left here on the panel. GNOME 45 now has this really cool dynamic workspace indicator. What this is, it tells you which workspace you're on. You can see because the one area of the indicator is colored wide and it's a little bigger. Right now we're on the first workspace, but I believe if I scroll with my mouse wheel, yeah, I can scroll to the second workspace or scroll back. And of course there will be keyboard shortcuts for that as well. I believe the keyboard shortcuts are control alt and the arrow keys. So if I do control alt and then right, I can go to the second workspace, control alt, left would go back to the first workspace. One other interesting addition to the GNOME 45 desktop here in Ubuntu is the quick settings menu, which is basically your SysTrade application that has, it's seen a little bit of development. It really looks sharp, right? This is a very attractive quick settings menu is what they call it. And if you type super S on the keyboard, you can quickly bring that up because this may be something that you need to access all the time because it does have sliders, for example, for volume. It may have other information as well. They did mention that if you had a keyboard that had the ability to be backlit on the keyboard that you would see that in this menu. So depending on what kind of hardware you're running, you may have different things in this quick settings menu. Now because I chose the default installation, which is really a minimal installation of Ubuntu, if I want to search for some applications, there's really not much installed out of the box. So with the default installation, the minimal installation, really all you get, you have an image viewer, you have the text editor, you have a calculator, other than that, and the utility subcategory here, you have the disk tool, you have the document viewer, PDF viewer, right? And really not much else. A lot of the other stuff is really like system preference, system settings, kind of tools. Of course you have the software center as well, and of course the terminal emulator, which is of course the GNOME terminal. Let me go ahead and make the GNOME terminal full screen. I'm gonna go ahead and zoom in. So let's go ahead and get a few things out of the way. If I do a unnamed dash R, the kernel version is 6.5.0-9 generic. So very recent kernel here in the latest Ubuntu. I did a where is pipe wire. Pipe wire is the default audio server. If you're wondering how many applications are installed on this very minimal version of Ubuntu, let's do a apt list space dash dash installed, which gives us a list line by line of every application, every program that is installed via the apt package manager by up arrow and pipe all of that into WC space dash L. To get a line count, 1,550 packages are installed via apt. That is a rather slim installation because especially for those of you not familiar with how Debian and Debian base distributions, which Ubuntu is based off of Debian, typically you're looking at 2,000 to 2,500 packages installed even on really minimal distributions. The fact that we're only dealing with about 1,500 packages, that is quite slim. Of course, not every package is installed as a deb pack. There are some snaps installed out of the box. Let's do a snap list. And the only applications that are really installed as a snap or Firefox and the snap store. So the software center. So really only two snaps are pre-installed Firefox. The reason it's a snap is because Mozilla has chosen to actually package Firefox for Ubuntu as a snap rather than a deb pack. I know a lot of people found that controversial like canonical is pushing snaps on people. Well, the Firefox thing was not their decision. They don't package Firefox themselves. That's a Mozilla thing. And that's the route Mozilla chose to go. And let's see how long it takes for Firefox to launch as a snap. That's rather quick. That was the very first time I've launched Firefox in this VM. That launched about as fast as you would expect Firefox to launch if it was installed as a native deb pack, right? That was very fast. So if I go to help and about Firefox, we can see we're on Firefox version 118.0.1. So pretty recent version of Firefox as well. One of the biggest new features with Ubuntu 23.10 is the software center. It's the new Flutter based app center is what they're calling it. And by default, one thing to note is they are pushing snaps here. Most of these programs are going to be installed as snap packages. I think there is options available to also offer Debian packages. But let me see if I choose to install transmission which is the GNOME BitTorrent Client. You can see channel latest stable. These are channels for snaps. I'm assuming that's going to install as a snap pack. We do have this little kind of settings icon here. I wonder if clicking on it doesn't look like clicking on it does anything. So I don't know if that was supposed to offer me some extra options or not. But let's go ahead and install transmission. We'll go ahead and see if it installs as a snap package. You can see it. We get a little confirmation there that it is installing and it finished installing that took just a few seconds. So now let me go ahead and close out of the app center and let me go ahead and open a terminal again. Control Alt T is a key binding that should work to bring up a terminal. Let me zoom in and now if I do a snap list and let's see if transmission is a part of the list it is. So transmission was installed as a snap package. So let's see if we can figure out how to install things as Debian packages rather than snap packages. So I'm going to go back to the software center and I'll just search for something small like H-top. H-top I'm not sure if it's already installed or not but let's go ahead and install it and you can see sort by relevance filter by snare. It is snap packages or Debian packages. So if you want to you can filter your search results by showing only Debian packages or showing only snap packages. So that is nice. So if I wanted to install the Debian package version of H-top you can see it is not already installed. So let's go ahead and install it. This should just take a couple of seconds and it installed just fine. I'm assuming let's do Control Alt T and now let's run H-top. Running H-top is a good idea anyway. Let's see what kind of system resource usage we're using. It looks like GNOME 45 is using just under a gig of the six gigs of RAM that I gave this VM. As far as CPU usage, not much going on. 3%, 4%, that's pretty normal. Shouldn't be using really any CPU because I'm not really doing anything right now in this virtual machine. So let's go ahead and close the terminal. One thing I want to mention is prior to the release of 23.10 Canonical had said that they were going to ship CUPS which is the printer server. They were going to install CUPS as a snap package. Now when I did the snap list earlier, CUPS was not there and the reason it's not there is because there was a problem with the CUPS snap package. So they're installing CUPS as a regular Debian package still until they get all the bugs fixed with the snap package. So you'll have CUPS installed as a snap package probably in the next release of Ubuntu. The last thing I want to talk about is some of the aesthetic changes to Ubuntu. Let's talk about just the overall look and feel. Some of the eye candy because I've got to say this is a gorgeous version of Ubuntu. Of course, GNOME 45 is a big part of that. The latest version of GNOME looks really good but there are also some changes as far as obviously some of the artwork, the default wallpaper here. I don't think this is the default wallpaper. This is the default wallpaper to me because I chose the dark theme but if I right click and go to change background let's see some of the other wallpapers that were available. So obviously the code name Mantic Minotaur we're gonna have a lot of Minotaur like creatures here. Here's one that could be interesting. Switch to a different workspace to see that. What is that pixel art? That's interesting there. I'm not sure I like that. This one here could also be interesting. You know what? That actually is a really cool wallpaper. That is sexy as hell. I'm not gonna lie. And here's one and let's try this one out. Yeah, actually that one works really nicely against the dark theme. I think I'm gonna keep that one. So as always, the Ubuntu wallpaper pack is stellar. Another thing to notice with Ubuntu is the fonts are a little different now because for as long as I can remember and I've been using Linux on the desktop for about 15, 16 years and I originally started with Ubuntu. As long as I can remember, Ubuntu always defaulted to deja vu fonts, the deja vu font family but they've recently switched to the Nodo font family. So that is something to be aware of in some applications. You're gonna see a little difference with the fonts. Another really obvious change as far as aesthetics is some of the GTK theming especially with the GNOME applications themselves such as the GNOME settings application here. You can see the sidebar, it is full height, right? So the sidebar used to come up to about here but then you had the title bar of the window that took up 100% of the width. Now though the sidebar, you can see the sidebar is 100% full height of the application window and most of the GNOME core applications will be like this if I launch Nautilus, the file manager, you can see the sidebar for Nautilus also follows that same design. So overall my impressions are as always a boon to their desktop, sexy as hell, love the artwork, love the icon theming, love the GTK theming. I love the fact that it is so minimal out of the box, the default installation just gives you a handful of applications. You don't have an audio player, you don't have a video player, you don't have a photo manager, right? And it makes sense because most people have their own preferences for which audio player they want or which video player or which photo manager, whatever it happens to be. Do you want an office suite? Do you not want an office suite, right? You install what you want, just open up the app center, install the programs that you need. That way you're not left with a whole bunch of extra stuff, extra cruft installed on the system programs that maybe you don't even need. Just a little bit of time that I spent in this VM checking out a boon to 23.10. I gotta say I'm impressed. I do wanna congratulate everybody at Canonical and all the Ubuntu team, job well done. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Daniel Gabe James, Matt Paul, Royal West, Armoredragon Commander, Angry George Lee, Methodist Nate Erion, Paul Peace, Archimvedor, Realities for Less Red Profit, Role and Soul-Ashtree Tools, Devler, Vorge, Intu and Ubuntu and Willie. These guys, they're my hot steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Ubuntu 23.10, Mantic Minotaur. It would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon. If you like my work and wanna see more videos about Linux and free open source software, like Ubuntu, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. One of the best wallpaper packs I've ever seen.