 Ubuntu is probably the most popular distro out there and that's why every single release that comes out people are excited about it Or at least pay attention to it, even if they don't use Ubuntu and I'm one of those people. I'm not an Ubuntu user I pretty much never have been I have used on many machines over the years, but it's never been my daily driver I've always preferred arch but because I'm a Linux Enthusiast I like paying attention to what Ubuntu is doing because it's very important for not only myself But for people in my audience and you know people that I talk to online So for that reason I do tend to take a look at every single Ubuntu release either in a VM or on a piece of hardware It alternates so today. I'm going to be taking a brief look at Ubuntu 21.10, which was released today I'm not going to be doing the traditional Review thing on it. I have some opinions on what Ubuntu is and I want to talk about those opinions instead of doing a Traditional review if you want to see a review of all the new features and all that stuff I suggest you check out the Linux experiment. Nick has done a fantastic review of Ubuntu and its flavors It's up on his channel today. Give that a check if you want more opinion-based stuff Continue on with this video here. So first Let's go ahead and take a look at what Ubuntu 21.10 looks like So this is a boom to 21.10. So let's first talk about the wallpaper I think that the wallpaper paradigm that Ubuntu has chosen has run its course At least the last two in a row now have been just bad wallpapers. This is not a good wallpaper I think this color scheme is just kind of run its course, but this is what Ubuntu does. This is the color scheme The animal thing freaks me the fuck out. It just really does it's staring at me and it's The very first thing I would change If I were to actually use Ubuntu would get rid of that wallpaper because it's staring at me and it's you know Creeping me out but outside of the wallpaper. There are a few things with Ubuntu 21.10 that are just very Very confusing. So The biggest one of those Is their implementation of GNOME itself So for those of you who don't know Ubuntu uses GNOME, but it's not stock GNOME if you use fedora 34 the new 35 beta you'll see stock GNOME and you'll see how The GNOME developers actually have decided that GNOME is supposed to be But Ubuntu has their own take on GNOME. So basically they've forked this thing and they've gone through and done Their stuff to it and made it a little bit more customizable, which is good But also made it much more Ubuntu So they have the dock along the side and so on and so forth and makes it look like Ubuntu has looked for You know going on 20 years The things you'll notice right away in 21.10 that are different than what Ubuntu used to look like is that when you hit this application icon down here or the application drawer you get you get some Previews of your desktops up here. Also, if you hit the windows key, you'll see the brand new multitasking view now this is obviously coming from GNOME 40 Which was released last year and it is now in Ubuntu It is not obviously the same as GNOME 40 because we have the dock along the side instead of the bottom But it's here and I think it's good. It's not the best, but it's good It's still weird the proportions here seem a little bit off to me, but whatever. That's just a thing The so the biggest thing you'll notice if you upgrade to 21.10 is this new multitasking view There are a ton of other small features like pipe wires here now They've changed the dock a little bit so the unpinned applications go Beyond this little divider here and that there's a now a recycle bin in the the dock that you actually can't get rid of It's there whether you like it or not the biggest problem I have with 21.10 Is that the versioning is really weird so for ages and ages Ubuntu Has been pretty much in lockstep with GNOME terms of versioning. They were always a little bit behind but they were always fairly, you know in in sync with what GNOME has been doing so that if GNOME was releasing 3.38 the next release of ubuntu would have 3.38 and so on and so forth and that was The entire stack of software applications everything would be updated and everything would be pretty much the same version That is no longer the case so in 21.04 Ubuntu was not ready to implement GNOME 40 so they Started this thing where several applications were the 40th version That came from GNOME 40 and several of them including the GNOME shell itself that they use was A whole version behind at 3.38 That confusion has gotten even worse here in 21.10. So If we close this here now that we don't need you know an example window We can go through some of the applications and we'll see Well, actually first what we'll we'll look at Is GNOME itself so GNOME The GNOME version of ubuntu 21.10 is 40.4 Now if you'll know anything about GNOME you'll know that GNOME just released GNOME 41. So they're not using GNOME 41. This is GNOME 40 And that means it misses out on all the workspace improvements that GNOME 41 implemented all the bug fixes and stuff like that that GNOME 41 Has you know been working on for an entire year. So this is an entire year behind for the GNOME shell Which is fine. It's still going to be working just fine And you know, it's I'm sure that they've fixed some of their own bugs themselves. So that's not a huge deal Where it gets messy is once we start looking at the applications So for example, we got the calendar here if we go up here to the about Calendar we'll see that this is calendar version 41 And it comes with many different improvements including Options for new services new implementations and all that kind of stuff everything you'd expect from a brand new version of the calendar That calendar application can continues to be improved every single version. So we have the brand new version Of calendar, but if we go to say the software center if we can look at the software center here If I can actually find I don't think this is the right one. It's actually this one here that i'm looking for And we'll have to actually wait for it Actually, it's up already. So if we take a look at the about section here, we'll see that this is Ubuntu software 3.38 So this is actually now two versions behind what the GNOME software center is And that's a significant because the GNOME software center in version 40 40 or 41, I don't even remember Was completely redesigned and it had a bunch of new features And actually I think it was 41. So any of those features Ubuntu doesn't actually have now that's because they've gone through and rewritten this Because it's all snaps now, but you don't get that, you know, implementation of the new interface If we look at files and we look at the about files, we see this one's version 40.2 So this is a version behind And that means you don't get any of the implementation of the new Nautilus stuff from GNOME 41 If we take a look at GNOME disks, we'll see we have version 41 If we look at the terminal We have version 3.38 If we look at cheese, which is the selfie application or the the video application to take a photo of yourself You get version 3.38. I don't even know if there is a version 41 of cheese. Maybe there's not maybe that's the reason why it's old But it's definitely two versions behind if there is a version of cheese If we look at the fonts application, this is version 41 So I could continue to go through every single application on here And the thing is is there's no rhyme or reason to it Whether you get version 41, whether you get version 40, whether you get version 3.38 It seems to be a crap shoot. It doesn't really make any sense. What gets what And we don't know any of the reasons why they've chosen these versions of the software and that's the whole point Is that Ubuntu has become a mess when it comes to versions You don't know what you're going to get from version to version because they're no longer In lockstep with GNOME. That's a big problem And I don't think that most people who use Ubuntu probably will even notice because most people who use Ubuntu just want to use their computer They don't care about new features In the long run. Most people are just going to download Ubuntu and use it But those of you who are early adopters Those are you who have gone through and downloaded this today Are going to notice this because you were looking forward to several new features and some of those new features that you Might have been expecting in terms of GNOME 40 or 41x features You're not going to get whether that's from the GNOME shell or it's from certain applications in the GNOME stack Now another thing that is missing from 21.10, which Is not a huge deal because we really do want it to be ready But is the brand new ubuntu installer the ubuntu installer is going to be written in something called flutter And while you can agree or disagree on whether or not that's a good idea It doesn't seem to be ready in time for ubuntu 21.10 And that's a huge deal because the way Ubuntu works is that this this release here right before the next lts is always going to be the one where ubuntu kind of tries out the new features Last year it was Wayland They put Wayland in for the first well I mean not really the first time but it was the first time they were really going to stick with it And they put it in right before so that they could go through and test it for a whole Six months before the lts came out and if it wasn't ready they could not put it in lts But it turned out to be ready. It was there There's no big grand feature like that this time other than perhaps pipe wire But there's no real i mean real big Change that we're seeing for The next lts that we're going to be testing here in 21.10 And that's a little weird Just on the surface of it, but it also is odd That we're still have this Weird combination of versioning in terms of applications and you know Shell and all this stuff when we have Some that are 3.38 which is two years old at this point We have some that are going on 40, which is a year old and we have some that is going on 41 It's it's just weird and they've made it overly complicated I think for themselves because they're you know behind on some stuff they're Right caught up on some other stuff. It's just a little weird and It's a mess and I don't think That it's sustainable I think that eventually we're going to have to see them catch up because this whole where Some things are two years behind some things are a year behind some things are are up to date is I don't know. It's I like I said, I don't think it's sustainable I think eventually they'll have to catch up and the problem is we're not going to see that in an lts release I don't think that they'd make that big of a change in in an lts release now. I could be wrong But I think it's more likely that we'll have to wait until Next fall next October for them to finally catch up and I think that they will because I think that they have to So the question remains should you upgrade to a boom 2 21.10 if you're already in a boom 2 user And you're using 21.04 Chances are you're going to upgrade anyway So you're going to get a few new features some of your stuff is going to be newer You're going to have better, you know, uh newer security updates and all that kind of stuff if you upgrade It's a good idea, you know, you're going to get going on 40 some of the good on 40 features that you missed out on in 21.04 It's a good thing For the most part for those of you who are using 21.04 if you're on the last lts chances are you were never going to install this anyways, but if you were Or if you were thinking consider I would just say stay on the lts because there's nothing here that is huge That you need to try out beforehand before we move on to the next lts You're just probably going to jump from one lts to the next lts. Anyways, and that's what you should continue to do because there's no huge Shiny New feature here that you need to worry about And as I said a moot 2 continues to be a very messy distro when it comes to versioning at least more messy Than it used to be so that's a whole thing. Those are my thoughts on a boom 2 I'm not in a boom 2 user So none of this stuff really matters to me as much as it will matter to other people But from an outside perspective A boom 2 seems to be a little bit lost in terms of what they're doing I feel because it doesn't feel like they are As buttoned up as they used to be in terms of Keeping up with upstream gnom and maybe that's by design. Maybe they're getting tired to gnom. It's possible. I mean The gnom developers aren't necessarily the most warm and fluffy people and maybe they're Maybe a boom 2 has gotten to the point where they have to put so much effort into Customizing gnom shell that they can no longer actually keep up with gnom itself. That's completely possible And if that's the case might I suggest using kde as your own as your desktop and instead Um, it's just an idea or bring back unity unity was great, you know Maybe it's time to use something other than gnom So that is it for this video if you want to get in contact with me You can do so at the linux cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast before I go I like to take a moment to think of my current patrons Devon chris east coast web gen 2 is fun too patrick l marcus maiglin jackson iphone tool steve Mitchell art sinner merit camp josh will lead j dog in the bsd rock. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time