Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 17.10 featuring a new GNOME desktop on Wayland, and new versions of KDE, MATE and Budgie. On the cloud, 17.10 brings Kubernetes 1.8 for hyper-elastic container operations, and minimal base images for containers.

This is the 27th release of Ubuntu, and forms the baseline for features in the upcoming Long Term Support enterprise-class release in April 2018.

Let’s take a quick look at what is new with this release (based on a statement from Canonical):

• The Atom editor and Microsoft Visual Studio Code are both available across all supported releases of Ubuntu including 16.04 LTS and 17.10.
• The new default desktop features the latest version of GNOME with extensions developed in collaboration with the GNOME Shell team. Ubuntu users. 17.10 will run Wayland as the default display server on compatible hardware, with the option of Xorg where required.
• Connecting to WiFi in public areas is simplified with support for captive portals.
  Firefox 56 and Thunderbird 52 both come as standard together with the latest LibreOffice 5.4.1 suite.
• Ubuntu 17.10 supports driverless printing with IPP Everywhere, Apple AirPrint, Mopria, and WiFi Direct.
• The release enables simple switching between built-in audio devices and Bluetooth.
  Ubuntu 17.10 features platform snaps for GNOME and KDE. Hiri, Wavebox, and the Heroku CLI are notable snaps published during this cycle.
• The catkin Snapcraft plugin enables Robot Operating System (ROS) snaps for secure, easily updated robots and drones.
• There are new mediated secure interfaces available to snap developers, including the ability to use Amazon Greengrass and Password Manager.
• Ubuntu 17.10 ships with the 4.13 based Linux kernel. The 17.10 kernel adds support for OPAL disk drives and numerous improvements to disk I/O. Namespaced file capabilities and Linux Security Module stacking reinforce Ubuntu’s leadership in container capabilities for cloud and bare-metal Kubernetes, Docker and LXD operations.
• Canonical’s Distribution of Kubernetes, CDK, supports the 1.8 series of Kubernetes.
• 17.10 introduces netplan as the standard declarative YAML syntax for configuring interfaces in Ubuntu.

[Image courtesy: Canonical]