There's plenty in Ubuntu 16.10 that makes it worth the upgrade, though nothing about Canonical's latest release is groundbreaking. This less experimental but worthwhile update continues to refine and bug-fix what at this point has become the fastest, stablest, least-likely-to-completely-change-between-point releases of the three major "modern" Linux desktops.

Still, while the Unity 7.5 desktop offers stability and speed today, it's not long for this world. Ubuntu 16.10 is the seventh release since the fabled Unity 8 and its accompanying Mir display server were announced. Yet in Ubuntu 16.10, there's still no Unity 8 nor Mir.

In Canonical's defense, the competing display server project, Wayland, hasn't exactly taken the world by storm. Wayland will likely be the default for the Fedora Project's next release, Fedora 25. But the difference is that GNOME 3 isn't tied to Wayland and has been cranking out impressive releases for some time now while Unity 7.5 is feeling, well, a bit dated.

It's worth noting that Ubuntu 16.10 is the first official release of Ubuntu to ship with Unity 8 and Mir available. And users can even try out a Unity 8 session by clicking the Ubuntu symbol next to their username when they log in.

Good luck getting Unity 8 to run, though. Older hardware isn't up to the task, and most new Nvidia-based hardware won't work either. For this review, I used both a Dell XPS and System 76 Oryx Pro—neither one of these very modern, well-specced pieces of hardware can successfully boot to Unity 8. Most disappointing, the accounts I've seen of people who can get Unity 8 running (like this video) show a streamlined Unity interface with... a new set of icons and some UI elements reminiscent of GNOME Shell. It's banal enough—at least within the skin-deep look we can get right now—to make you wonder what the fuss is about.

Of course, the fuss is about "convergence." The fuss is about the purported future in which you plug your phone into a monitor and it turns into a full desktop computing experience. I've started to feel like Fox Mulder waiting for Unity 8. I want to believe. I really do, but I've started to think convergence is about as likely as the zombie apocalypse. The truth, the reality we'll end up with, looks to be somewhere below Canonical's fantasies of do anything phones and flesh-eating updates that install Windows instead of Linux.

All of that is to say: Unity 8 still isn't here yet. Users should probably stop holding their breath waiting for it to arrive.

In the meantime, Canonical has shipped a very nice desktop operating system that's fast and stable. Ubuntu 16.10 has fixed most of the issues that plagued the 16.04 release, which was supposed to be the Long Term Support release. If it were up to me, I'd much rather support Ubuntu 16.10 for five years than 16.04, so luckily most of what's great about 16.10 will be backported to 16.04 at some point. If you were bitten by 16.04, but not bitten hard enough to want to get off the LTS bandwagon, sit tight. Backports are on the way.

Kernel 4.8

The biggest and best news to arrive with 16.10 is probably the move to Linux kernel 4.8. Earlier this year I called kernel 4.6 one of the best to come along in years (paraphrasing Linux Torvalds)... but 4.8 is a significant upgrade for the additional hardware support. In particular, there are three notable developments in 4.8: improved Skylake support, better support for Nvidia Pascal, and support for the raspberry pi 3.

Skylake has been a very hit or miss series of chips in both Linux and Windows, though it seems particularly prone to problems in Linux. Kernel 4.8 fixes a Skylake power management bug that can crash your system and seems to generally be much more stable than earlier releases. I still occasionally experienced a bug with Chromium and YouTube both on Ubuntu and Arch running 4.8, but otherwise 4.8 has solved all the problems I previously noticed on Skylake machines.

Nvidia Pascal cards get some love in this update as well. The new support applies to the open source Nouveau driver, and while it's far from complete, it's a start. I'd still suggest sticking with Nvidia's proprietary drivers for now, but at least Nouveau support is in the works.

The Raspberry Pi 3 support is good news for anyone looking to get Ubuntu installed. Previously, Linux kernels had to be patched to work with the Raspberry Pi 3, which in practical terms meant you needed the Debian-patched Raspbian. Now, RP3 support is native to the Linux kernel, meaning any distro should run just fine provided you turn off any graphics-intensive UI.

There are also a couple of more universal improvements to ACPI low power mode, which might squeeze a few more minutes out of your laptop battery. Equally big improvements to USB camera and HDMI device capture will be welcome to those of you editing video in Linux.