Ubuntu 21.10 Pre installed desktop

New features in 21.10
Updated Packages
Linux kernel :penguin:
Linux 5.13 860 introduces support for new hardware and some less new:

Future Intel and AMD chips, such as Intel Alderlake S or AMD Adebaran.
Microsoft Surface Laptops and tablets 517.
Rudimentary Apple M1 support.
See also Linux 5.12 changes 680 for new features since 21.04.
As well as the usual plethora of bug fixes across the map.

Toolchain Upgrades :hammer_and_wrench:
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 :lock:
nftables is now the default backend for the firewall.

Base System
systemd is being switched to the “unified” cgroup hierarchy (cgroup v2) by default. If for some reason you need to keep the legacy cgroup v1 hierarchy, you can select it via a kernel parameter at boot time: systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0 (bug 1850667 43)
Ubuntu Desktop
Wayland sessions are now available while using the Nvidia proprietary driver.
PulseAudio 15 502 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 :footprints:
Ubuntu 21.10 includes GNOME version 40 1.5k, including a new and improved Activities Overview design. 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.

Updated Applications
Firefox :fire::fox_face: version 93 is now seeded as a snap by default 303, instead of a deb package. The snap is jointly maintained by Mozilla (its publisher) and Canonical. The deb package remains available in the archive and will continue receiving updates for the lifetime of Ubuntu 21.10.
LibreOffice :books: version 7.2.1
Thunderbird :cloud_with_lightning::bird: version 91.1.2
Updated Subsystems
PulseAudio version 15.0 502
BlueZ version 5.60 151
NetworkManager version 1.32.12 196
Ubuntu Server
OpenLDAP has been updated to 2.5.6
A new OpenLDAP release, version 2.5.6, is available for Ubuntu Impish users. This release brings several changes, new features and deprecations/removals. A non-exhaustive list of things to be aware of during the upgrade process is:
The shell (slapd-shell), the BDB and the HDB backends have all been removed.
The ppolicy module now provides its own built-in schema. The external ppolicy schema has been removed.
The nssov module has been removed
In certain situations, it is possible that the post-installation scripts will not be able to successfully migrate your current installation to new formats (e.g., when you are using an old backend like BDB/HDB). If this happens, you will be notified about the failure and the slapd server will not be (re)started; you will then have to take manual action in order to migrate your data and start the service. Please look at the README.Debian 15 file (under /usr/share/doc/slapd/) for more information.
Telegraf has been updated to 1.19.2
This new version of Telegraf introduces some new features. It supports more SNMP v3 authentication protocols (including SHA-512); it also adds support for DataDog distributions 18 metric type.
PHP now defaults to version 8.0.8
Ubuntu has transitioned to the PHP 8 runtime language 35, and updated the wider PHP ecosystem in Ubuntu 21.10 to use this version. New features include the JIT compiler, union types, attributes, and more.
Users of PHP 7.4 should note that version 8.0 removes a number of deprecated functionalities 97 and when upgrading should be prepared to make the appropriate changes to their applications.
Apache has been updated to 2.4.48
Adds SSL related inquiry functions to the server API, to ease the identification and loading of the right SSL modules.
Adds OCSP response provisioning as a core feature, allowing mod_md and mod_ssl to exchange X.509 digital certificate data with each other.
QEMU was updated to the 6.0 release.
This version adds the ES extension to AMD SEV which adds guest register state to the protected assets.
Furthermore in regard to emulation RISC-V got many improvements and ARMv8.1M as well as several ARM extensions were added.
The emulated NVMe controller is now compliant with NVMe version 1.4 and added subsystems, multipath and namespace sharing.
See the upstream changelog for 6.0 37 for an overview of the many improvements and also a list of suggested replacement functionality for removed features and incompatible changes.
Libvirt has been updated to version 7.6
virtio-pmem <memory/> model.
Sharing and hot-plugging of <transient/> disks with QEMU.
More configurability for virtiofs use cases allowing an external virtiofsd.
Older Hypervisor targets are no more supported dropping code for QEMU releases older than 2.11 and Xen releases older than 4.9.
Specifying s390-pv as launch security type in an s390 domain prepares for running the guest in protected virtualization secure mode.
See the upstream Changelogs 17 for the many further improvements and fixes since version 7.0 that was in Ubuntu 21.04 39.
Open vSwitch has been updated to 2.16
Removed support for 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which is now considered unsafe
OVSDB Introduced new database service model named relay. Targeted to scale out read-mostly access (ovn-controller) to existing databases.
Linux datapath: ovs-vswitchd will configure the kernel module using per-cpu dispatch mode (if available). This changes the way upcalls are delivered to user space in order to resolve a number of issues with per-vport dispatch.
Further changes and improvements can be found in the upstream changelog 7.
Chrony has been updated to version 4.1
The more secure NTS 29 feature that was added in 4.0 in Ubuntu 21.04 now got various enhancements in regard to configure certificates.
More details of what changed since version 4.0 can be found in the upstream news page 19.
Bind9 has been updated to 9.16.15
Ubuntu Impish’s BIND9 software received a major update since hirsute’s 9.16.8 15, which includes performance improvements for zone queries, and better control over purging old keys and stale data.
Of note, BIND9 now prefers the SPNEGO implementation from the system GSSAPI library rather than the prior ISC implementation.
Containerd has been updated to version 1.5.5
In this new version the support for the Node Resource Interface (NRI) was added, and it also has changes which may affect projects that import containerd. For instance, the CRI plugin moved into the main repository, and there are some API changes in the OCI library.
More details about what changed since the former version 1.4.x can be found in the upstream release page 16 .
Runc has been updated to version 1.0.1
This is the first stable release of runc to be shipped in Ubuntu. As a consequence of this version update, there are some changes to the libcontainer API that break compatibility with older versions of the library.
There are also a bunch of performance improvements and bug fixes. More details about what changed since the last Ubuntu release can be found in the upstream release page 10.
Corosync has been updated to version 3.1.2
In this version, the default corosync configuration does not set the node name to node1 as in the last Ubuntu release, instead it uses the output of uname -n command. If you want to keep the old behavior, check the configuration file and uncomment the needed lines.
Fence-agents has been split into curated and non-curated agents
There is no new upstream version in this Ubuntu release, however, the fence-agents package was split into fence-agents-base (curated agents) and fence-agents-extra (non-curated agents), and now fence-agents is a metapackage which installs all the agents. A curated agent means that the Ubuntu Server team has been validating it in a Continuous Integration system.
For more information about the curated agents check the Ubuntu Server guide 17.
Resource-agents has been split into curated and non-curated agents
There is no new upstream version in this Ubuntu release, however, the resource-agents package was split into resource-agents-base (curated agents) and resource-agents-extra (non-curated agents), and now resource-agents is a metapackage which installs all the agents. A curated agent means that the Ubuntu Server team has been validating it in a Continuous Integration system.
For more information about the curated agents check the Ubuntu Server guide 11.
OpenStack
Ubuntu 21.10 includes the latest OpenStack release, Xena, including the following components:

OpenStack Identity - Keystone
OpenStack Imaging - Glance
OpenStack Block Storage - Cinder
OpenStack Compute - Nova
OpenStack Networking - Neutron
OpenStack Telemetry - Ceilometer, Aodh, Gnocchi
OpenStack Orchestration - Heat
OpenStack Dashboard - Horizon
OpenStack Object Storage - Swift
OpenStack DNS - Designate
OpenStack Bare-metal - Ironic
OpenStack Filesystem - Manila
OpenStack Key Manager - Barbican
OpenStack Load Balancer - Octavia
OpenStack Instance HA - Masakari
Please refer to the OpenStack Xena release notes 46 for full details of this release of OpenStack.

OpenStack Xena is also provided via the Ubuntu Cloud Archive 7 for OpenStack Xena for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS users.

WARNING: Upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process and care should be taken to plan and test upgrade procedures which will be specific to each OpenStack deployment.

Make sure you read the OpenStack Charm Release Notes 4 for more information about how to deploy and operate Ubuntu OpenStack using Juju.

Raspberry Pi :strawberry:
Sense HAT support added (bug 1944450 7 and bug 1944449 4); sudo apt install sense-hat to install the required configuration and libraries. The Sense HAT desktop emulator is also available via sudo apt install sense-emu-tools.
u-boot removed from the boot sequence for upgraders (bug 1936401 26); this also means that USB MSD boot is supported for both fresh installs and upgraders.
On server images, cloud-init now reliably operates over both ethernet and wifi (bug 1870346 20).