Canonical recently released Ubuntu 15.10, nicknamed Wily Werewolf. In the past, an autumn release of Ubuntu Linux like this would have been more experimental, warranting some caution when updating. Such releases weren't quite update-at-your-own-risk rough, but they were often packed full of new features that were not fully baked. (For example, the now-shuttered Ubuntu One first debuted in 9.10. The Unity desktop became a default in 11.10, and the controversial Amazon search results in the Unity Dash made their debut in 12.10.) Especially compared to the spring .04 releases that tended to be stable (and every two years packaged as Long Term Support releases), autumn was Canonical's time to experiment.

Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on how you feel about desktop experiments—that's not the case with Wily Werewolf.

There are new features worth updating for in this release, but, on the whole, this is Canonical refining what it has already created. The organization is essentially getting ready for the next LTS release (Ubuntu 16.04, due toward the end of April 2016), which will also likely be the last LTS release based on Unity 7.

So by this time next year, 16.10 will bring back the experimental new features with an entirely different beast on the desktop. Look for Unity 8, Mir, and other big changes to return in next year's .10 release, re-establishing the fall as Canonical's playground.

But talk of Unity 8 and what it means for Ubuntu can wait—we should first appreciate Ubuntu 15.10, which might be the very last of its kind for a little while. This is a stable, welcome update that doesn't require you to radically change your workflow or habits.

Ubuntu 15.10

While Ubuntu 15.10 is unlikely to win any awards for innovation, the kernel update includes some very useful new features, a couple of UI changes for Unity, and plenty of application updates. All of these make the new release well worth an update.

The most notable UI changes are the scroll bars, which are now pulled straight from GNOME 3. Canonical has abandoned its little disappearing "handle"-style scrollbars in favor of GNOME's defaults (which have improved considerably since Ubuntu started work on its own version). The change appears to be based more on code maintenance and development effort than any strong aesthetic feelings from Canonical. Writing and maintaining your own scroll bar code may be more work than it's worth. The visual change is minor and solves quite a few bugs in Canonical's home-grown scroll bars, making it a win for users as well as the programmers once tasked with maintaining the old code base.

Abandoning the homegrown scroll bars might also mean that Unity is able to integrate upstream GNOME updates faster than it has been lately. With this release, most of the GNOME suite of tools that powers much of Unity have finally been updated to 3.16, though a few holdouts like text-editor GEdit remain at much older versions.

Aside from the scroll bars, there aren't many visual changes to this release. Unity itself gets a slight version bump with some bug fixes and a couple of new features, including a new option to drag icons out of the Dash launcher and onto your desktop. If you were really missing the ability to clutter your desktop with something other than files, well, now you can throw some application launchers in there for good measure.

Other notable bug fixes in Unity address an annoying problem with full-screen menu bars and the ability to access locally integrated menus—that is, menus within the window rather than in the top bar—on unfocused windows.

While those are welcome fixes, most of what's interesting in this release is not directly from Canonical. The most exciting thing in Ubuntu 15.10 is probably the updated kernel, which is now based on the upstream Linux Kernel 4.2.

The 4.2 line brings support for recent Radeon GPUs and some new encryption options for ext4 disks. There's also support for Intel's new Broxton chips, which just might be finding their way into an Ubuntu Mobile device at some point. 15.10 marks the first time that the new live kernel patching has been available in Ubuntu, and this release adds a new kernel for the Raspberry Pi 2 as well.

Linux game aficionados will be happy to hear that this release ships with support for the new Steam controller.

Developers get some love in this release, too, with updates for Python and Ubuntu Make, Ubuntu's impressive suite of developer tools. If you're looking for a quick way to get, for example, a basic Android development environment setup, you'd be hard pressed to beat Ubuntu Make's simple umake android command.

Anyone doing tech support from an Ubuntu machine will be happy to hear that Virtualbox has been updated with the latest version, which offers guest additions for Windows 10. The rest of Ubuntu's standard application suite has been updated as well, including the latest version of Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, and more. Even LibreOffice has been upgraded to version 5, a major update for LibreOffice users.

In testing, Ubuntu 15.10 has been rock solid. But that said, I had some trouble installing 15.10 via Chrubuntu on a new Dell 13 Chromebook primarily related to trackpad drivers. Chrubuntu is a bit of a hack, though it's probably not fair to hold it against Ubuntu. 15.10 has otherwise been very stable and wonderful to use on all the devices I've tested it on.

This is especially true on my old Eeepc, where Ubuntu offers something that gets very little press—UI scaling. Typically HiDPI screens get all the attention, and, indeed, Unity looks great in high res, but Ubuntu also has some great scaling in the opposite direction. Using the slider under Settings >> displays, it's possible to downsize the entire UI, which gains you some precious real estate on smaller screens. It doesn't work everywhere (Firefox is my most-used exception), but it does make it easy to reclaim a few pixels on small screens.