Ubuntu 21.10 was released yesterday, 14 October. It is a standard release and as such is only supported for 9 months. It uses Gnome 40 as the default desktop environment. So what is new? It introduces the horizontal workspace switcher to replace that irksome vertical one. It has a revamped application launcher and it adds multi-touch gestures to make it easier to enter/exit workspace switcher but they are only available in a Wayland session by default.

The Dock is still on the left side of the screen but now there is a separator between pinned shortcuts and running but not pinned apps. The trash can and any USB drives are on the Dock instead of the Desktop.

The Yaru light theme is now default. Apparently missing is the Standard theme. The dark theme can be enabled in settings.

Zstd compression is enabled for the main archive.

Wayland can now be used on systems with proprietary NVIDA graphics drivers.

It includes LibreOffice 7.2, Thunderbird 91, and the latest version of FireFox as well as several Gnome 41 apps and ships with the Linux 5.13 kernel.

It can be downloaded from https://ubuntu.com/#download. There are also links too the various Ubuntu “flavors” at that site on the lower right side of the page. Happy Ubuntu-ing.