It's based on Xfce 4.12 desktop environment and Linux 4.13

Oct 19, 2017 14:50 GMT  ·  By

The Xubuntu 17.10 operating system has been released today as part of the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) release, bringing a refreshed Xfce desktop experience, up-to-date components, and many other improvements.

During the six-month development cycle, the Xubuntu team decided to update the appearance of the official Ubuntu flavor based on the Xfce desktop environment and designed for low-end computers or PCs from ten years ago. As such, client side decorations (CSD) were updated to use less space when using the Greybird GTK+ theme.

Besides a new wallpaper that adds a "refreshing touch of green" like the Xubuntu devs like to say, there's new monochrome, mimetype, and device panel icons including in the elementary-xfce icon theme, and the GTK+ toolkit was upgraded to version 3.26, which offers support for Unicode 10.0.0 and color Emoji.

Talking about GTK+ 3, several components were ported to it during the Xubuntu 17.10 development cycle, including Xfce Dictionary, Genmon Plugin, and Mount Plugin, and Exo's GTK+ 3 support received more improvements. Also, the Clipman plugin was ported to GtkApplication, and Tumbler to GDBus.

Numerous Xfce components and apps have been updated

On the software side of things, Xubuntu 17.10 comes with the GNOME Font Viewer app by default to help users easily view and install fonts on their system, and updates several key components to their latest releases. These include LibreOffice 5.4, Mozilla Firefox 56, Mozilla Thunderbird 52.4, and Python 3.6.

Numerous other Xfce components and apps have been updated in this release, which also includes all the under-the-hood goodies from Ubuntu 17.10, such as the extended driverless printing support, GCC 7 as default compiler, out-of-the-box accelerated video playback for Intel GPUs, as well as Bluetooth and USB audio improvements.

Xubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) is available for download right now on our website, for 64-bit and 32-bit computers, but you can easily upgrade from Xubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) if you follow our tutorial on how to upgrade Ubuntu 17.04 to Ubuntu 17.10. Xubuntu 17.10 is running the Linux 4.13 kernel and will be supported for nine months.

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Xubuntu 17.10 (5 Images)

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