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Canonical officially released today the Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur) operating system, which comes with some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies, improved hardware support, and many other changes.
Ubuntu 23.10 is powered by the latest Linux 6.5 kernel series, which has been enhanced for Ubuntu Desktop and Server with zstd-compressed modules to speed up boot time, new Apparmor / Stacking LSM patch set, updated shiftfs patch set, support for idmapped Ceph mounts, multi-gen LRU page reclaiming enabled by default, and desktop-oriented .config tweaks for the lowlatency kernel flavor.
It also features the latest GNOME 45 desktop environment series, which comes with new features like a new Activities indicator, a new camera indicator, a new Quick Setting for changing the keyboard backlight, much-improved and revamped Settings and Nautilus file manager apps, and many other changes.
Some of the default Snap apps received performance improvements, such as the Firefox Snap, which now comes with the native Wayland mode enabled by default when using the Wayland session for a snappier browsing experience.
The Ubuntu Desktop Installer has been updated as well with an experimental ZFS on Root installation option and Minimal Installation as the default installation option. Another experimental feature introduced in Ubuntu 23.10 is support for unlocking full-disk encrypted installations without typing a passphrase on TPM 2.0-capable devices.
To improve Ubuntu’s overall security by default, Mantic Minutaur’s kernel has been adjusted to require programs to have an AppArmor profile in order to use unprivileged user namespaces. This change was done to mitigate the larger attack surface presented by unprivileged user namespaces.
On top of that, Ubuntu 23.10 brings a brand-new App Store called “App Center” written in Google’s Flutter SDK, just like the Ubuntu Desktop Installer, which replaces the previous Snap Store. The new App Store gives you full access to all of Canonical’s Snap apps, but also supports the DEB package format.
Other changes include Netplan as the default settings storage backend for NetworkManager, pre-installed GNOME Clocks app, a new standalone Firmware Updater app for updating your device’s firmware at a glance, support for Raspberry Pi 5 and SiFive HiFive Pro P550 boards, and machine certificate auto-enrollment support from Active Directory Certificate Services.
Under the hood, Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur) uses GCC 13 as the default system installer, GNU Binutils 2.41, PHP 8.2, GNU C Library (glibc) 2.38, Go 1.20, LLVM 17, and many of the latest GNU/Linux technologies.
The official Ubuntu flavors are shipping with updated desktop environments too, including KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS for Kubuntu and Ubuntu Studio, LXQt 1.3.0 for Lubuntu, Cinnamon 5.8 for Ubuntu Cinnamon, and Budgie 10.8 for Ubuntu Budgie.
Update: Due to an incident, Canonical removed the Ubuntu Desktop image from downloads. I will update the article again with the download link when it’s available. Meanwhile, I’ve replaced the link with the Legacy image using the old Desktop Installer.
Update 2: The Ubuntu Desktop image has been restored.
Last updated 7 months ago
