Windows is not the only operating system with a new version to show off. Ubuntu, the Debian-based Linux distribution, has just released version 21.10 (Impish Indri), and quite a lot has changed.
Workspaces themselves have moved from a vertical to a horizontal design, and there are new touchpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts for navigating them. Security is enhanced by a clever new randomisation of the kernel stack in memory at each system-call entry on both the amd64 and arm64 architectures with, it is claimed, a minimal impact on performance. Kernel Electric Fence, a runtime memory error detector, is also supported.
Elsewhere, there are plenty of tweaks that make this look like a release targeted at developers. There's immediate compatibility with Windows Subsystem for Linux, while PHP gets an update to version 8, and the GNU Compiler Collection moves to version 11, with front-ends for C and C++ among other languages.
If AI or machine learning are your thing, you’ll appreciate the new snap package of Apache Cassandra. Speaking of snaps, there's one for Firefox too, for both the latest and the extended support release versions of the browser.
Impish isn’t a Long Term Support version of the OS, but the final interim release before the next LTS, due in April 2022. An image for Ubuntu 21.10 is available on the Docker Hub and Amazon ECR Public Registry. Or you could just download it from Ubuntu.com, or update your current installation.
