Ubuntu 16.10 Released, Tumbleweed Gets Wayland, KDE 1 Revived

The big story today was the release of Ubuntu 16.10 in its various forms and editions. In other distribution news, openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio today announced the arrival of Wayland to Tumbleweed and Jeff Hoogland released an updated Bodhi 4.0 beta for 64-bit architectures. Elsewhere, the KDE project today released KDE 1 and Jim Zemlin was featured recently in The Inquirer's Legends of Linux series.

Ubuntu 16.10 and family have hit the streets. Canonical announced the release today highlighting the Unity 8 preview saying, "You can now chose to log in to a Unity 8 session directly from the greeter. The current experience comes with a minimal set of applications; a browser, terminal and systems settings." Other new features include Linux 4.8.0, GCC 4.6.1, Firefox 49, and LibreOffice 5.22 GTK3. GNOME apps have been updated to at least 3.20 with many being 3.22 and systemd now controls user sessions as well. Download Ubuntu Desktop, Server, or Cloud at www.ubuntu.com. Kubuntu 16.10 features Plasma 5.7.5 and can be obtained from kubuntu.org. Distrowatch.com has links to all the various variants. In related news, Phoronix.com's Michael Larabel said Wayland isn't working very well on Ubuntu GNOME 16.10.

Speaking of Wayland, Douglas DeMaio today said that a recent snapshot of Tumbleweed featured the Wayland graphical server. Wayland is making its way into more and more distributions with Fedora poised to release their first stable system with Wayland as default. Also in Tumbleweed currently are Digikam 5.2.0, Qt 5.7.0, Lightdm 1.19.5, and Libreoffice 5.2.2.2. Linux 4.8 is in staging and expect to crop up in a snapshot soon.

Jeff Hoogland announced an update to the recently released Bodhi 4.0 Beta 2 today saying, "The installer was crashing when you launch it on the 64bit ISO image." They fixed the problem that seemed to involve Python errors with the gtk-ui and uploaded new images today. So, 64-bit users probably already know they need a new download.

KDE developer Helio Castro today announced the release of KDE 1. He wasn't kidding and, in fact, said, "No, I'm not crazy - KDE 1 is for real." Castro's pet KDE Restoration Project was born out of the need to demonstrate some older versions of KDE for their twentieth anniversary. "This was an easy job, anyone could do with an old distro and a virtual machine. And technically boring." So, he rebuilt old source to run on a "modern, complete bleeding edge environment." And what's more, you can try them too. He's working on some Fedora packages, but the source is available now.

And finally, be sure to check out "Legends of Linux Part 4: Jim Zemlin."