 There are several things that happen in the Linux community that happen like clockwork One of those things is the Ubuntu release cycle every April and every October. We get a brand new shiny Ubuntu release and Usually about a month before that release We get to see a beta version of what we're going to see in October or April So what I've been doing the last few releases since I started the channel is taking a look at the beta because Everyone does a video about the actual release and sometimes I do those too But this time I'm just going to take a look at the beta because I want to take a look at some of the really cool new features that are available in 21.10 that it will be coming out here in October So today what I'm going to do is install this thing in a VM and take a look at some of those features because I'm actually Kind of excited about this version of Ubuntu for you know once it's gonna be a big one. So let's go ahead and jump in So here we are in virtual box and we're just gonna open this up and Launch it here like this. So we get the first view of the brand new wallpaper Personally, it looks like a quality to me But I've seen some really horrific like like memes of this thing that are just kind of Truly scary. So so as as usual we get to an install screen here. We'll just go ahead and install and We'll hit continue And we'll leave this at the normal installation. I'm not going to update do the updates here I'll do the updates afterwards and we'll go ahead and install third-party software like I normally do And we'll continue here We'll see if the VM is gonna crap out on me. Sometimes During these next couple steps The VM does not like the fact that I'm not using a specific video driver and it just stops and then I have to start over again But we'll see if it does it this time. Okay, so let's go ahead and hit install now and then continue and It looks like it's gonna go ahead and go through this time So we'll continue again and we'll enter our credentials and a very strong and complicated password And then we'll hit continue again and then we'll install it. So I'm going to go ahead and cut the video here and Come back when it's done Okay, and that is All done now Ubuntu is working on a brand new installer But apparently that is not actually in the beta yet whether or not it will be here for the final release of 21.10 I don't know Now this is all that is information coming from omg Ubuntu It's possible that that was what we just saw was the new installer and they're so similar I just can tell a difference, but it looks like the standard Ubuntu installer to me at least but you got to remember. I'm not an Ubuntu guy. I Don't know. I don't have every inch of the Ubuntu installer memorized. I Just don't Sad, you know sad for me, but I don't so I'm gonna go ahead and hit restart now And we'll see if we can get into The actual install so we'll hit enter here Now I will just say that this is a beta piece of software so we can expect there might be some bugs I'm not going to go through and judge it for those because again, it's a beta that would be rude of me For example being stuck on a purple screen. I may end up having to restart this or go out of full screen and go back into Sometimes that works. All right, well, we'll just power this down and try again We'll see how this works So we get past this screen here, and then it goes to this the purple screen and We're stuck there Okie-dokie Well, I'm gonna go change the video drivers and see if that works. Oh Wait a minute. Here we go. Never mind. All right Yeah, it's still not liking me. All right, we're just gonna We will go change those video drivers then we'll install guest additions like a normal person. I guess so we'll click close Power this off and I'll change the graphics driver to the normal one and hit ok We'll start again. We'll see if that fixed it. Hopefully that fixed it That did fix it. See look at that I'm a smart guy. Okay Let's go ahead and we'll first see if I can go through and Get into the terminal and just you know, I'm not going to be able to do it because this is Wayland so we're gonna have to install the Graphics drivers like normal because I don't have a cool how to change the well. We could do a Display here we go And 1920 by 1080 apply there we go keep changes I'm so used to doing everything in the terminal that when I can't do the things in the terminal I forget that there's usually a gooey way of doing this So I'm glad I remembered this time instead of actually having to go through and install guest additions and doing it though You know old-fashioned way. All right, so this is the traditional Ubuntu welcome screen connect online accounts. We'll skip that We can send all of the information to canonical have my virtual machine Information you can have it location services will leave that on because Despite them having all my information. They don't need my location as well Not that they could you know, do that with the IP address. Anyways, let's see the apps and that's it So there's nothing new there and we will go ahead and do updates here but first I will open up a terminal and Zoom in here a little bit Do and do pseudo apt update and and pseudo apt upgrade And we'll let this go here now. There shouldn't be too many because this beta was just released yesterday There are in fact a few so we'll go ahead and let that do that thing and in the meantime we'll take a look at the really weird implementation they have of GNOME 40 this is GNOME 40 so If you remember GNOME 40 vanilla GNOME 40 has a bar along the bottom But obviously, you know or Ubuntu couldn't do that because they have the doc along the side So we don't have actually a thing of activities along the side We have it here along the top and it's possible that I'm just misremembering GNOME 40 and they weren't along the top all along but what's interesting here is that the The view of this is like off-center Like it feels like this is because this here is touching the bottom and I don't believe that that's the case in GNOME 40 itself I think it's like zoomed out even a little bit more like you can actually see both, you know workspaces you have open and You know like part of it along the side so that looks quite a bit different than what vanilla GNOME 40 looks like Yeah Also Where is the app drawer? Because there used to be like an app drawer down here at the bottom. Is there not a way to get to that anymore a Few moments later. I'm wondering if it's like off-screen because that would make sense It would make this look here more sense because you want to do rounded corners at the top and then not be able to See the bottom, so I'm wondering if I messed up on that display resolution. Let me go look at the display thing again I did see I chose 1920 by 1200. This is gonna be better There we go Who said reading was not hard. I mean come on numbers man Okay, this is much better. All right now if we go to the activities view we can see oh, yeah, that looks more like GNOME 40 Though they got it look really dumb. Okay. Good now I'm gonna go ahead and do a reboot here and So we can have those updates take effect and then we'll continue on with something to look at some of the new features Okay, so obviously the biggest new feature for 21.10 is that Ubuntu will be shipping GNOME 40 by default now If you're not unaware of how this went really we should have seen GNOME 40 in the previous version of Ubuntu 21.04 but because GNOME 40 and that were really close together Ubuntu really didn't have a chance to go through And implement all of GNOME 40 before they were to release 21.04 So we had that pushed back and you'll know that if you've seen GNOME 40 that it's a fairly big change over the previous three series and We can also see that Ubuntu here hasn't completely adopted GNOME 40 because we still have the traditional Ubuntu icons along the side here and all that it's really not much has changed in that Area the only thing it looks like in terms of UI that they've actually Taken from GNOME 40 is the multitasking view which is now looks like this instead of just having the activities along the side so whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing is really going to be depend on your position on GNOME GNOME 40 Ubuntu and for me personally, I'm gonna reserve judgment until I use it a little bit more but I Would have liked to have seen more of a refresh but I'm Change for change sake kind of guy. I like new fresh shiny things that I can talk about and show on video. So That's usually where my perspective comes in. Okay, so now the change is that the trash icon is now here in the dock And that is persistent now. It's going to stay there forever. You can't get rid of it either So that stays there whether you like it or not. Okay? That is an interesting choice Also by default, you'll notice something a little bit different is that the Yaro theme is now completely light theme They've done away with the mixed theme For the last couple releases of Ubuntu. We had a light theme here with but with a dark header bars Because they thought that that was too hard to maintain they've just gone now with a pure light theme and a pure dark theme interestingly enough we have a Box up here at the top, which I'm not exactly sure what that is all about I Assume that that was like the highlight of the activities thing when the activities is activated Yeah, that must be a little bit of bug. But remember, this is a beta software. So it's not that big of a deal you can go through and change this to the dark theme which is what I'm going to do because In my opinion the dark theme should be default. It just looks Way way way better than the standard light theme But again, that's a subjective thing. So we're just go ahead and close this and That's a bit another change. You only have light and dark themes Under the hood. We also have ZSTD compression by default. That's going to make installs of software faster. Supposedly It's been something they've been working on for a long time So we'll get to see if that actually makes any difference The compression has to do more with once it's downloaded and actually installing. So Maybe on older hardware, you'd see a change. I don't know. We'll have to see Wayland cannot be used on systems with proprietary and video graphics drivers. That's a Huge deal, right? Because for years invaders has not done a good job of supporting Wayland at all They just completely ignored it and now they seem to have finally jumped on that board, which is good So if you're using an Nvidia card, you should now be able to use the default session of Ubuntu instead of having to always switch back to x-word or using x-word by default Pipeware is now included, but it's not the standard default audio system on Ubuntu. It's just included It's it's supposed to just make it a little bit easier for audio to be processed on Wayland systems But pulse audio 15 is actually still the default audio system So as is usual with any release of this nature Most of what you're going to get is updated software So if you remember back in 21.04 Most of the stuff that we were left with was still going on 3.38 related. So Most of it like Nautilus and some of the other main apps like that were still kind of a version behind because they hadn't Completely made that switch over to get on 40 Now we're going to see that a lot of these are actually going to be the updated version So if we go to Nautilus, we'll see that this is files 40.2 We'll see That the software center, which will take a lot of load because it is a snap app Do-do-do-do-do-do-do now there we go decided to finally load Once it's good news is this only happens the first time you open it, but a few moments later Well, we're waiting for that. I suppose we can go through and look at some of the other stuff that we have here so we have Things like an additional driver things. I've never actually seen it an additional drivers Like icon in the app door before so that must be new so we have good on videos here This is going to be good on videos doesn't actually have an about Page okay, so that was useless The calendar maybe does this have an about page? We can yes we go. This is for 41 beta okay, so this is even more further ahead than files is and Then let's see here the text editor. This is going to be probably g edit. I would assume Yep g edit this is 40.1. It's a good little text editor slash Kind of an ID also that thing is taken forever See we have LibreOffice which that moved around Why did that move around that's really weird we at LibreOffice 7.2 Thunderbird 91 The latest version of the Firefox browser now This Firefox here, which we will load here now or will just continue to wait for that Oh for a long time This is Firefox, and this is a snap by default and again you can kind of tell it because it's It finally decided to load It's just not as fast on that on cold launches as a non snap would be Because snaps are inherently slow off cold launches, and that's just thing now if I close this and Then we launch it It shouldn't take as long. Yeah, that wasn't quite as long so Whether or not that's a good thing or a bad thing I would argue I would rather have the deb package But whatever I'm not gonna get into it too much if you want to see me ranting about snaps you should watch the podcast that we posted yesterday, but This is now a snap app and it will be a snap app in the just the default version of Ubuntu All the flavors should still have the deb packages, but starting in the LTS next year Every Firefox will have snap by default the snap Firefox by default and I will just continue to say that that is still back there loading That has to be a beta thing. I just has to be Normally, that's not normal. Okay. It's just not Okay, so there are a few genome 41 apps that are here including calendar system monitor and genome disks So those are the genome 41 apps The rest of these should all be genome 40 apps. So they'll be a little bit behind It'd be interesting to see if we ever see when to actually catch back up to get them because for a long time They were you know in step, but now it doesn't seem like they are so a few of the other features that we can see in 21.10 That I can't actually show you are things like multi-touch gestures. I don't have a track pad So so supposedly Multi-touch gestures are highly improved or exists. I like I don't even know because I've never used them. I have Even on the laptop. I had behind me. It has a track pad. I never use it I just use mouse because it's easier. We also have we'll just go ahead and look at the Terminal here and We'll look for you name dash a and we're losing Ubuntu or Linux 5.13.0 So that's not quite the most recent Colonel but it's very close So it will get you a lot more hardware support than what the older versions will In Ubuntu does a really good job of keeping that up to date. So it's not really that big of a worry I mean we can take a look at Memory usage, but for the most part it doesn't really matter this Pretty much standard for you know, it's actually a little bit less than what I usually remember Especially considering we have something open here I'm just gonna close this because that's dumb. We'll try opening it up again That's just really odd. That has to be a bug, right? Okay. Anyways, so let's see here We'll uh pseudo app install neofitch I'm always constantly surprised that neofitch takes that long to install on Ubuntu because What does it need image magic for? I would really love to know why neofitch requires image magic as a dependency. That's just kind of weird, right? It has to have something to do with the ASCII art Maybe I don't know. Anyway, so we got Ubuntu impish eat in injury. I like the last Name much better than this. I can't say this I feel like they're always trying to get more and more weird on their names and Eventually we'll just get to the point where we can actually pronounce any of them This is 5.13 as we're talking about has 17 thought 100 packages This is about normal for a Debian based distro. I've come to learn that Debian packages things differently. So There's not much you can do there and there's With with arts usually it's quite a bit less than that but they package things together like completely differently Apparently it does not read the resolution correctly because that's not what we chose GNOME 40.2 is what it's reading at is the desktop environment. He's using mutter. This is that I wait the themes not it's weird They've stuck with an add-a-waiter for the shell theme instead of just using coming up with a yaru to match and That's see that's pretty much it in terms of features now If you had asked me what the biggest headline feature of GNOME Or of Ubuntu 21.10 what would be it's the implementation of more of the GNOME 40 stuff So when we click on activities up here, we get this view. This is basically what you're getting when you hunt and search for features that are new in Ubuntu you're getting a New layout here. That's pretty much it and I can't say that I'm not a little bit disappointed that they didn't do a Little bit more than this. It's just because it feels like this probably could have been done last Release, but I'm not a developer. Maybe there was more going on behind the scenes than what I know I'm assuming that most of what we're gonna be seeing now is just continued work. I'm making Wayland Better for everyone so that because Wayland is now default on Ubuntu and we they need to have that 100% working for every possible Hardware configuration by the time the LTS comes out if they're going to ship Wayland by default on the LTS it has to be as Rock solid as they can make it and I think that that's probably what they've spent most of their time doing And it's probably why we haven't seen a little bit more of the information implementation of GNOME 40 features so So that's the Ubuntu 21.10 beta first look And like I was saying I'm not gonna judge it too hard because I really wanted to use it a little bit more before I You know get into it I probably will do a long-term review of Ubuntu 21.10 so that will come out probably about a couple weeks after it's Officially released. I will install this on hardware later on and just kind of keep it on there and let it kind of roll into the actual stable release that comes out in October and I'll use it off and on until then Personally, I Not on Ubuntu guys I'm always going to be much more critical of Ubuntu than someone who uses Ubuntu as a daily driver So we'll have to go through and try to tone that bit down because I was actually really excited about this release And I thought that the GNOME 40 stuff would be a little bit more More I guess but what you're gonna do anyway, so we have a new multitasking thing We we're gonna get the new installer probably And then the rest of it seems to be just updated apps for the most part is what you're gonna notice and that's there's nothing wrong With the Ubuntu being just kind of an iterative iterative release but usually the one before the LTS has some really good features and This one just kind of seemed a little bit low on those But I miss they're probably doing a lot of work on that back and getting that whale and just So rock solid anyway So that's it for this video if you want to get in contact with me You can do so at the Linuxcast on Twitter You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the next cast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Devon Chris East Coast Web gentu is fun to Patrick L brand new patron Marcus Meglund Sven Jackson F tool Josh release Steve a brand new patron Mitchell Arts Center Merrick Camp J-Dog and The bd bsd's rock I'm gonna have a hard time ending on that one, but also brand new page and thanks everybody who has Supported me for all this time and continues to do so and all the new guys and just thanks for your support Thank you everywhere for watching. I'll see you next time