The early bird gets a touch of nostalgia as Ubuntu 24.10 hits beta

The beta version of Ubuntu 24.10 has just come out, with GNOME 47 as its default desktop and some fun retro touches. It's an interim release that will only get updates until next August, so it's mainly for enthusiasts; if you go for it, you're committing to the next couple of interim releases. After Oracular, you will need to …

[Altrux]

Naming Nonsense

I'm still hoping the next release is called Pusillanimous Platypus!

[Liam Proven]

Re: Naming Nonsense

Probably not -- it tends to be a positive adjective. Sorry...

[keithpeter]

Gnome 47...

...is also available in Fedora 41 beta but in the default upstream style (less adjustments compared to Ubuntu's version, especially in the placement of desktop components).

The new system file dialogs are more compact and work better on a 1366x768 screen. Desktop (wayland) does seem more responsive (8Gb RAM, mechanical hard drive, Intel graphics, 2011 era processors) than previous versions.

Back on topic: the non-LTS Ubuntu versions were *reasonably* solid back in the 8s and 9s and even 10s. Perhaps the rate of technical change is slowing now wayland is maturing a bit, the sound system has stablised and The System We Don't Name has bedded in a bit?

[Liam Proven]

Re: Gnome 47...

[Author here]

> also available in Fedora 41 beta but in the default upstream style

Preview story coming soon. I filed it yesterday. :-)

I still do not personally like GNOME, but even so, it *is* maturing and it does look very pretty.

I am very keyboard-driven, and GNOME doesn't support most of the time-honoured 30-year-old PC keyboard UI. Unity did, Xfce does, LX?? do to an extent. GNOME only has a few fragments that they seem not to have noticed and removed yet.

The odd thing is the GNOME advocates _think_ it's for keyboard-warriors, when in fact it's only for newbie keyboard warriors, not the battle-scarred veterans.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm

Hope it works better for me than 24.04 which broke startup things for me when I upgraded.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Hmmm

[Author here]

Do tell?

24.04 was a difficult release. New 64-bit date and time stamp handling, new APT, new lots of things.

Everyone has to make these transitions, but not all distros have to handle it for two-year-old code... This didn't happen to Fedora or Arch or Debian, because they don't have LTS releases. It hasn't impacted RHEL yet, but then RHEL discourages in-place version-to-version upgrades.