Ubuntu 21.10 Beta Released

[Sonadow]

UEFI secure boot. Several company has it as a requirement for their device policies.

And most companies issue Windows laptops or Windows desktop computers to their employees. Anyone who puts a different OS on a company device deserves to be fired for tempering with it.

Secondly, unless the device has a fucked up Secure Boot implementation (especially ASUS and MSI), it's (almost) usually trivial to have Secure Boot bless a custom kernel. My laptops and workstations are booting my own self-built kernels with Secure Boot enabled.

[jabl]

Sadly, it seems they haven't done the pulseaudio -> pipewire switch, which probably also means they won't dare to do that for 22.04 as that's a LTS.

[hubick]

Sadly, it seems they haven't done the pulseaudio -> pipewire switch

In the article noting Ubuntu 21.10 will also missing Gnome 41 they were like "Ideally we would have updated to 41 but feature freeze is today and we didn’t really have the resources available for the update. If you want to update some components please do".

No resources? For the primary desktop environment for your desktop distro? Like, if you don't have resources for that, what do you have resources for? I'm starting to think this might not be the year Linux finally makes it on the desktop.

[calc]

5.13? That's EOL. They've been making terrible kernel decisions. 5.8 also is what they were also using for the AMD package.

I actually tried supporting 5.8 kernel in my script. Didn't boot. Wasted my time. But at least now I know.

Sorry to be annoying, but they should really start abiding by these kernel rules:

mainline: 5.15-rc2 2021-09-20
stable: 5.14.7 2021-09-22
stable: 5.13.19 [EOL] 2021-09-18
longterm: 5.10.68 2021-09-22
longterm: 5.4.148 2021-09-22

Ubuntu has always done this and has a dedicated kernel team just like Red Hat to support it.

Currently supported Ubuntu releases, they only use LTS kernels when it happens to line up :

14.04 - 3.13.0
16.04 - 4.4.0 (LTS kernel)
18.04 - 4.15.0
20.04 - 5.4.0 (LTS kernel)
21.04 - 5.11.0
21.10 - 5.13.0

On the Red Hat side they are also still supporting ancient non-LTS kernels:

6 - 2.6.32
7 - 3.10.0
8 - 4.18.0

[motang]

Are they really going snap only for Firefox on this release?

Yes, Mozilla approached Canonical regarding it. So they are testing it out in this release and staging to be the default for next LTS 22.04. I have been using the snap version of Firefox for a while and I really love it. I loads up just as fast, everything works for me in it so I really don't see any difference.

[perpetually high]

Ubuntu has always done this and has a dedicated kernel team just like Red Hat to support it.

Currently supported Ubuntu releases, they only use LTS kernels when it happens to line up/

On the Red Hat side they are also still supporting ancient non-LTS kernels:

I see.. thanks for clarifying and laying it out like that. I wonder why they do that, it seems like an awful lot of extra work, and I honestly can't imagine a good reason. I tried compiling that latest EOL 5.8. Didn't even boot on my system. Didn't look into why, but it should've booted. Was pretty vanilla with no patches either.

There's nothing special about non-LTS kernels except they fall out of flavor. *Some* non-LTS kernels can be better than an LTS. I think that was the situation with 4.19 LTS and when 4.20 came out. I forget

But anyways, maybe they have a good reason. I just haven't seen one yet though

[calc]

I see.. thanks for clarifying and laying it out like that. I wonder why they do that, it seems like an awful lot of extra work, and I honestly can't imagine a good reason. I tried compiling that latest EOL 5.8. Didn't even boot on my system. Didn't look into why, but it should've booted. Was pretty vanilla with no patches either.

There's nothing special about non-LTS kernels except they fall out of flavor. *Some* non-LTS kernels can be better than an LTS. I think that was the situation with 4.19 LTS and when 4.20 came out. I forget

But anyways, maybe they have a good reason. I just haven't seen one yet though

Actually there is a very good reason and its pretty obvious.

New hardware support.

That's also why Ubuntu puts out new HWE kernels every 6 months to update the kernel even further.

LTS kernels only come out once per year so for any hardware that didn't make the cut off point... too bad.

The current LTS releases are:
5.10 - Dec 14 2020
5.4 - Nov 25 2019
4.19 - Oct 22 2018
4.14 - Nov 12 2017
4.9 - Dec 11 2016

Otherwise Ubuntu would still be stuck on 5.10 as its still the current LTS kernel.

[perpetually high]

New hardware support.

That's also why Ubuntu puts out new HWE kernels every 6 months to update the kernel even further.

LTS kernels only come out once per year so for any hardware that didn't make the cut off point... too bad.

Otherwise Ubuntu would still be stuck on 5.10 as its still the current LTS kernel.

calc That's a great point. Thanks for explaining further

[Danny3]

Again with an old kernel ?
And not using PipeWire by default ?
Seriously Canonical, WTF ?

It's so weird that even PipeWire is not included since some people said that it was included in 20.04 by default.
I wonder if they at least updated other libraries.

[sarmad]

Damn it. I'm waiting for kernel 5.14 so I can run my external AMD GPU without needing to reboot.