Ubuntu's autumn release of 15.10, nicknamed Wily Werewolf, is beginning to take shape. The first beta builds of this development cycle are now available for download. As has been Ubuntu's process for a few years now the main, Unity-based Ubuntu desktop sits out this initial beta, but Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu MATE and Lubuntu all have preview releases available. The amount of new features varies by spin from Kubuntu, which offers some major updates for the KDE platform that serves as its base, to Lubuntu, which has almost nothing in the way of new features and consists primarily of a few bug fixes. ## Kubuntu 15.10 The biggest news in the Ubuntu universe right now is Kubuntu 15.10, which uses the hot-off-the-presses KDE Plasma 5.4 desktop. Plasma 5.4 is huge update for KDE, bringing everything from preliminary Wayland support to smaller, but more noticeable changes like a nice new set of Plasma Widgets and improvements to KRunner, the revamped, extendible launcher in Plasma 5. The KDE team has also been finishing up work on the new "flat" look of Plasma 5. In my initial review of KDE 5 I mentioned that it was a bit rough around the edges with missing icons, the search field in the Kickoff app launcher was hard to discover and other little problems. As of 5.4 all that stuff has been fixed. There are some 1400 new icons, call consistent with the brighter, flatter design aesthetic the characterizes Plasma 5. The other area that's much improved in this release is KDE's support for HiDPI screens. In previous Kubuntu releases I had trouble getting the HiDPI support to work in virtual machines, but as of Kubuntu 15.10 that's no longer an issue. There has also been considerable improvement to the various widgets that KDE offers. There's a new one for volume and a slick new network applet that offers a nice graphical view of your network traffic (it also now supports SSH connections via a plugin). ## Ubuntu MATE 15.10 The Wily Werewolf release of Ubuntu MATE ships with an interesting combination of MATE 1.8 and 1.10, depending on which component of the system you're talking about. Somehow it manages to do this without being too buggy, but it can make troubleshooting a little more time consuming since you first need to know which version of any problem component you've actually got. Among the MATE 1.10 elements is Caja, the default file manager, which gains an extension manager for handling plugins, meaning it's much easier to install and enable plugins (no need to restart). There's also the much improved multi-monitor support I covered in my Mint 17.2 review. There are, however, plenty of MATE 1.8 elements still hanging around. Elements like the main panel, the power manager, applets and icon theme all remain at their 1.8 versions. Perhaps related, perhaps not, Ubuntu MATE was the least stable of the betas I tested. In fact it would never really run at all in a virtual machine and didn't fare any better on actual hardware. ## Xubuntu 15.10 Xubuntu 15.10 Beta 1 is a relatively minor release compared to 15.04, which brought the massive overhaul of Xfce 4.12 to Xubuntu fans. Now that that big transition is out of the way, 15.10 primarily consists of bug fixes and minor improvements and updates. The biggest news so far might well be that Xubuntu has swapped out the lightweight Abiword app (the default word processor on most Xfce-based desktops) with the much larger, but more full-featured LibreOffice Writer. That shouldn't be to surprising given that Xubuntu has always taken a heavy-weight approach to Xfce, opting for more features rather than the lighter weight aspect that other distros prize. The change may also have something to do with the new Xubuntu-core, which is there for those who'd like keep things lean and simple. Other changes for Xubuntu in this beta include app updates for most of the defaults and some changes for the Thunar file manager. The latter includes a few features (or bug fixes, depending on how you look at it) that ensures new tabs and windows inherit the last used view (Thunar will also now remember the last used application when opening files). ## Lubuntu 15.10 The big news in Lubuntu is that there is no big news. The project is still in the process of making the move to the new Qt-based LxQt desktop. For now that means this release consists only of bug fixes and minor tweaks. The LxQT-based version of Lubuntu is slatted to arrive in next year's 16.10 release cycle. ## Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 ships with GNOME 3.16, which features a new notification system and a slightly lighter theme. The new look covers everything from the Activities Overview screen to login screen, as well as menus, which now feature monochrome icons for the most part. GNOME 3.16 also offers some new scrollbars, which are now only displayed when needed. These scrollbars will also be making their way into Ubuntu Unity 15.10 when it arrives. Canonical is apparently tired of trying to maintain its own custom scrollbars. This release also sees Ubuntu GNOME changing up the default application stack a little bit. The old photo editing/organizing standby Shotwell has been replaced with GNOME Photos and GNOME Music is now installed by default. The move away from Shotwell makes sense for Ubuntu GNOME since GNOME is doing the same and Shotwell has been all but abandoned for some time (the good news for Shotwell fans is that development does look like it will continue as part of the ElementaryOS project). There are a host of under the hood changes that will be a part of almost all of these flavours when the final release of Ubuntu 15.10 arrives. Updates to the base system and a new kernel will also be part of the main, Unity-based version of Ubuntu 15.10, which is still an alpha release. The Unity desktop will update for beta 2 later this month and it, along with all of the flavours, will be see a final version arrive come October 23. Screenshots: kubuntu1510.png - The default Kubuntu desktop showing new Network Widget. xubuntu1510.png - Xubuntu, now with more LibreOffice. ubuntumate1510.png - Ubuntu Mate 15.10, buggy enough that this is all you're likely to see. ubuntugnome1510.png - Ubuntu Gnome, Ubuntu fans, learn to love these scrollbars, they're coming soon to Unity.