Ubuntu 23.10 will be supported for 9 months until July 2024
It has been presented release of Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” beta version, which arrives with the purpose of marking the last phase of development of the system and in which it was completely frozen and the developers moved on to final testing and error correction.
The release of Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” It is classified as a regular release, whose updates are made within 9 months and which is basically a transition version for improvements and changes for what will become the next LTS version of Ubuntu 24.04.
Main new features Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur”
Initially, the first thing we can find in this beta of Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" is that the desktop environment has been updated to the release of GNOME 45, in which a dynamic virtual desktop indicator has appeared in the panel, search engine performance has been improved, a camera on indicator has been added, video playback has been hardware accelerated, the image viewer and the Camera app have been replaced.
On the part of Linux kernel, this has been updated to version 6.5, in which one of Ubuntu's specific changes was incorporated, which is the compression of modules using the zstd algorithm, which has reduced boot time, as well as new sets of patches for shiftfs, Apparmor and LSM.
Another change that we can find is that to install Ubuntu Desktop, the numbernew installer uses "minimal" mode by default. To enable the initial installation of additional applications such as LibreOffice and Thunderbird, you can select extended installation mode, plus experimental support has been added for disk encryption, which does not require entering a disk unlock password at boot, when storing information to decrypt keys in the TPM (Trusted Platform Module), plus the installer has returned support for the ZFS file system.
In addition to this, it also highlights the improved security for PPA repository key management, well add-apt-repository now add all data from PPA repository to .sources files in deb822 format, instead of adding separately
Another aspect that stands out about this beta of Ubuntu 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur" is that it uses the Netplan system, already used in Ubuntu Server, to store the network interface configuration. When you upgrade the system, the migration of NetworkManager configuration and profiles is done automatically.
Also, we cannot leave aside, the new application manager for Ubuntu Store, which implements a combined interface for working with packages in DEB and Snap formats (if there is a program in the deb and snap packages, snap is selected by default), allows searching and browsing through the snapcraft.io package catalog and DEB repositories connected.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Added the fonts-ubuntu-classic package, which provides a set of classic fonts used in Ubuntu before version 23.04.
- Support for hardware video encoding and decoding has been implemented in the snap package with the Chromium browser.
- Privacy management tools have been expanded: a mechanism has been added that prompts the user for permissions if it is necessary to grant additional rights to applications.
- The Raspberry Pi edition has added official support for modules with cameras, among other things, equipped with autofocus. The libcamera library has been updated to version 0.1. The cloud startup configuration has been changed to disable password authentication on the SSH server by default.
- An edition of Ubuntu Core Desktop is being developed, based on the Ubuntu Core platform and including only applications designed using Snap format packages.
finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
Download and get Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” beta
For those interested in trying this beta version of Ubuntu 23.10, you can obtain the installation images from the following link