The code name Impish Indri was derived from two different words..Impish means to do slightly naughty things for fun while Indri is a lemur native to Madagascar that spends the majority of its time up off the ground and in the trees.
Ubuntu 21.10 will only be supported for 9 months so if you need a long term support you might consider using Ubuntu 20.04.
Ubuntu 21.10 new features
Ubuntu 21.10 Desktop
- Wayland sessions are now available while using Nvidia proprietary driver.
- Pulse audio 15 introduces support for Bluetooth LDAC and APTx codecs as well as HFP Bluetooth profiles providing better audio quality.
- The recovery key feature at installation time has been improved. The recovery key is now optional, stronger and editable.
GNOME
- Ubuntu 21.10 uses GNOME 40 as its default desktop experience. Workspaces are now arranged horizontally, and the overview and app grid are accessed vertically. Each direction has accompanying keyboard shortcuts, touchpad gestures and mouse actions.
- New multitouch gestures are included that make it easier to enter/exit the workspace switcher, and are only available in the Wayland session by default.
Linux Kernel
Linux 5.13 introduces support for new hardware such as:
- Future Intel and AMD chips, such as Intel Alderlake S or AMD Adebaran.
- Rudimentary Apple M1 support.
- Microsoft Surface Laptops and tablets
Toolchain Upgrades
- GCC was updated to the 11.2.0 release, binutils to 2.37, and glibc to 2.34. LLVM now defaults to version 13. golang defaults to version 1.17.x. rustc defaults to version 1.51.
- OpenJDK 18 is now available (but not used for package builds).
Security Improvements
nftables is now the default backend for the firewall.
Base System
systemd is being switched to the “unified” cgroup hierarchy (cgroup v2) by default
Updated Applications
- Firefox version 93 is now seeded as a snap by default, instead of a deb package.
- LibreOffice defaults to version 7.2.1
- Thunderbird defaults to version 91.1.2
Ubuntu 21.10 Server
- OpenLDAP has been updated to 2.5.6
- Telegraf has been updated to 1.19.2
- PHP now defaults to version 8.0.8
- Apache has been updated to 2.4.48
- QEMU was updated to the 6.0 release.
- Libvirt has been updated to version 7.6
- Open vSwitch has been updated to 2.16
- Chrony has been updated to version 4.1
- Bind9 has been updated to 9.16.15
- Containerd has been updated to version 1.5.5
- Runc has been updated to version 1.0.1
- Corosync has been updated to version 3.1.2
- Fence-agents has been split into curated and non-curated agents
- Resource-agents has been split into curated and non-curated agents
Openstack
Ubuntu 21.10 includes the latest OpenStack release, Xena
If you want to read more refer to Ubuntu 21.10 documention.
