Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
14 October, 2021 was the date that Kubuntu 21.10 was made available for download. This new, “standard” Kubuntu release will be supported for nine months, until July, 2022. Kubuntu 21.10 is also the last of three releases before the next Long Term Support release comes out on 21 April, 2022.
This is Kubuntu’s 34th release, and the 13th with the KDE project’s Plasma 5 desktop which is based on the Qt toolkit. With its first release in 2006, Kubuntu is definitely a “mature project” and has a dedicated user base.
Booting It Up
I downloaded the ISO file from the Kubuntu website via BitTorrent, and completed a SHA256 check on it to make sure that the downloaded file was correct.
This version of Kubuntu is the biggest download so far at 3.1 GB, for the ISO file. It is bigger than any other Ubuntu family ISO, including Ubuntu 21.10 itself (which is 2.9 GB), so be warned if you have a slow connection.
I used UNetbootin to write it to a USB stick, as it conveniently leaves the stick in FAT32 format. Kubuntu 21.10 was 3.2 GB when unpacked by UNetbootin and with whatever headroom was required, would not fit on a 4 GB USB stick, so I had to use a 15 GB stick instead.
I tested Kubuntu 21.10 on new, high-end hardware, with a 4.7 GHz quad-core processor and 32 GB of RAM. It ran very smoothly and fast, as would be expected.
New
Kubuntu 21.10 uses the Qt 51.15.2 toolkit – the same version used on the last release, Kubuntu 21.04. The desktop, however, is the updated KDE Plasma 5.22 which has some refinements incorporated. The main menu system works very well in this new version, as it did in the last one. Both menu versions perform much better than earlier versions.
Also updated are KDE Frameworks 5.86 and KDE Gear 21.08 which are the collection of KDE utilities. Like all of the other Ubuntu 21.10 flavors, Kubuntu 21.10 uses the Linux 5.13 kernel which has support for newer hardware.
While Ubuntu has been using the Wayland display server for the last two releases, Kubuntu and the other Ubuntu official flavors have retained X11, leaving the Ubuntu developers to debug Wayland first. Kubuntu 21.04 first offered Wayland for testing, but with a warning that it was only for testing use. In Kubuntu 21.10, Wayland is still available as an option at boot-up but no longer carries the warning.
Every new Kubuntu release gets a fresh default wallpaper, and Kubuntu 21.10 is no exception. This time the new artwork is entitled Altai and is by Alesya Khoteeva. It features a geometric abstract interpretation of Asia’s Altai Mountains which sit in the area where the borders of Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan meet.
Settings
Kubuntu boasts the largest variety of user settings in the Ubuntu world, enabling users to make it look and work almost any way they want.
Kubuntu 21.10 has the same themes and settings that 21.04 offered: • Four global themes: Breeze, Breeze Dark, Breeze Twilight, and Kubuntu • Six Plasma styles: Air, Breeze, Breeze Dark, Breeze Light, Kubuntu, and Oxygen • Two window decoration themes: Breeze and Plastik • Six color schemes: Breeze, Breeze Dark, Breeze High Contrast, Breeze Light, Oxygen, and Oxygen Cold • Eight icon sets: Adwaita, Breeze, Breeze Dark, Humanity, Humanity-Dark, LoginIcons, Ubuntu-Mono-Dark, and Ubuntu-MonoLight • Eight cursor styles: Breeze, Breeze Light, KDE Classic, Oxygen Black, Oxygen Blue, Oxygen White, Oxygen Yellow, and Oxygen Zion
These are the options that come with Kubuntu 21.10, but most of the settings pages also offer downloads of many more themes and customizations which can be added.
Kubuntu 21.10 also has an installed library of 67 desktop widgets, small programs that provide extra functionality on the desktop. No wonder the ISO file is so big! Of course, there are hundreds more widgets that can be downloaded as well.
The Kubuntu philosophy is to give users as many choices as possible in how it looks and works. This puts Kubuntu at the opposite end of the spectrum from Ubuntu 21.10 which offers very little user customization. While Ubuntu feels more and more like an enterprise distribution, Kubuntu feels like it was designed by developers, for developers.
Applications
Some of the applications included with Kubuntu 21.10 are: Ark 21.08.1 archive manager Discover 2.1.2 software store* Dolphin 21.08.1 file manager Elisa 21.08.1 music player Firefox 93.0 web browser Gwenview 21.08.1 image viewer Kate 21.08.1 text editor Kcalc 21.08.1 calculator KDE Partition Manager 21.08.1 partition editor Konsole 21.08.1 terminal emulator Kmahjongg 21.08.1 game Kmines 21.08.1 game Konversation 21.08.1 IRC client Kpatience 21.08.1 game Ksudoku 21.08.1 game Ktorrent 21.08.1 bit torrent client LibreOffice 7.2.1 office suite, less only LibreOffice Base database Muon 5.8.0 package manager* Okular 21.08.1 PDF viewer Plasma System Monitor 5.22.5 system monitor PulseAudio 15.0 audio controller Skanlite 21.08.1 scanning utility Spectacle 21.08.1 screenshot tool Startup Disk Creator 0.3.11 (usb-creator-kde) USB ISO writer Thunderbird 91.1.2 email client VLC 3.0.16 media player
* indicates same application version as used in Kubuntu 21.04.
As can be seen from the lack of asterisks, most of the applications included are updated versions from KDE Applications 21.08, with no hold-overs at all from Kubuntu 20.12.
This release removes the KsysGuard system monitor graphical application, which has been replaced by the new Plasma System Monitor.
Since the Plasma 5 desktop is Qt toolkit-based, all the included applications are Qt-based as well, with the obvious exception of the Firefox web browser which is GTK-based. The hoped-for Qt-based replacement web browser, Falkon, which is an official KDE project, has not seen a new release in over two and a half years, making it pretty much “abandonware” now.
Like both Lubuntu 21.10 and Xubuntu 21.10, Kubuntu 21.10 provides the Firefox web browser as a .deb package and has not moved to using a snap package, like Ubuntu 21.10 has done. As with Lubuntu and Xubuntu, it will be interesting to see what the Kubuntu developers do for future releases, as the .deb version of Firefox is slated to disappear from the repositories at some point in the future, leaving only the snap version available.
As in past releases, Kubuntu 21.10 does not include a webcam application, an image editor or video editor, by default, although there are many options in the repositories, if needed. KDE's Qt-based Kdenlive would probably be the best choice in a video editor – both for its functionality and integration into the Plasma 5 desktop.
Kubuntu also no longer comes with a default CD/DVD burning application installed. Optical drives are pretty much obsolete technology these days, and new computers have not come with them for many years, so it makes sense not to include a default CD/DVD burner application. If you do still have an optical drive that you use to burn CDs or DVDs, then it is easy to install a burner application from the repositories, the KDE, Qt-based K3B application being the most obvious choice.
The Kubuntu 21.10 version of LibreOffice 7.2.1 is supplied complete, lacking only LibreOffice Base, the office suite's database application, which can be installed if needed.
The Kate 21.08.1 text editor continues to be worth noting. It has syntax highlighting and is very customizable, with many highlight color schemes. Kate also has spell-checking right out-of-the-box which is a welcome feature, putting it in the same class as Gnome's gedit. Neither text editor requires any setup to get to work coding or writing web pages.
Conclusions
Kubuntu 21.10 is another strong, polished release. In this development cycle since the last LTS release, only a few careful changes have been made, giving the message that both the developers and the users like how Kubuntu is these days and don’t see any need for big changes. Expect the LTS release, Kubuntu 22.04 LTS, due out on 21 April, 2022, to be very similar to Kubuntu 21.10, just with three years of support, instead of nine months.