Canonical, the creator of Ubuntu, has made waves in the tech community by releasing the beta version of the highly anticipated Ubuntu 23.10, codenamed “Mantic Minotaur.” This move is targeted at early adopters, developers, and those seeking a first glimpse of the upcoming OS release and its array of new features and enhancements.
The key features of Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” include being powered by the latest Linux 6.5 kernel series, boasting zstd-compressed modules for faster boot times, incorporating essential patches such as the new Apparmor / Stacking LSM patch set and updated shiftfs patch set, and offering support for idmapped Ceph mounts. Additionally, it introduces desktop-oriented .config tweaks for the lowlatency kernel flavor and enables multi-gen LRU page reclaiming by default.
A notable security enhancement in Ubuntu 23.10 is the requirement for programs to have an AppArmor profile for utilizing unprivileged user namespaces, a move aimed at reducing the attack surface presented by these namespaces.
The beta version showcases the GNOME 45 desktop environment by default, bringing a variety of new features and improvements. Some notable additions include a new Activities indicator, camera indicator, Quick Setting for keyboard backlight adjustment, enhanced Settings and Nautilus file manager apps, and more.
While not entirely on Snap yet, Ubuntu 23.10 beta sees performance improvements in default Snap apps like Firefox Snap, offering a snappier browsing experience with native Wayland mode enabled.
For those favoring Ubuntu on ZFS, the return of the ZFS on Root installation option is a welcome change, although marked as “EXPERIMENTAL” due to its usage of a development release of OpenZFS for Linux kernel 6.5.
Ubuntu 23.10 introduces an experimental feature allowing unlocking of full-disk encrypted installations on TPM 2.0-capable devices without requiring a passphrase, although it’s not compatible with NVIDIA graphics cards.
In terms of software, the beta includes the latest releases of LibreOffice 7.6 office suite and Mozilla Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” email client.
An exciting addition is the new “App Center” app store written in Flutter, replacing the previous Snap Store, providing complete access to Canonical’s Snaps. Notably, LibreOffice and Thunderbird are not installed as Snaps (yet).
Under the hood, Mantic Minotaur operates with the default system installer GCC 13, GNU Binutils 2.41, PHP 8.2, GNU C Library (glibc) 2.38, Go 1.20, LLVM 17, and several other updated GNU/Linux technologies.
Ubuntu 23.10 brings various other enhancements, including using Netplan as the default settings storage backend for NetworkManager, GNOME Clocks app installed by default, and a standalone Firmware Updater app for convenient device firmware updates.
The beta also sees updated desktop environments in official Ubuntu flavors, showcasing KDE Plasma 5.27 LTS, LXQt 1.3.0, Cinnamon 5.8, and Budgie 10.8 for Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Cinnamon, and Ubuntu Budgie, respectively.
The final release of Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” is scheduled for October 12th, 2023. For those eager to explore the beta version, it is available for download from the official website. However, it’s essential to remember that this is a pre-release version, and caution should be exercised when installing it, especially on production machines.
