Ubuntu 16.10 now available to download

It's been a great day for Linux geeks (and those of us with distro hopping issues) because Canonical has released Ubuntu 16.10 to the public. This version, dubbed Yakkety Yak, is now available for all to download from the Ubuntu website.

Ubuntu 16.10 will be supported for 9 months until July 2017 therefore if you are looking for an OS with long term support, stick with 16.04 for now. Ubuntu 16.10 brings with it the following improvements / changes:

• MAAS 2.0 delivers robust, highly-available IPAM and bare-metal provisioning
• Hybrid cloud operations with Juju 2.0
• Developer preview of Unity 8 includes desktop, tablet and phone UX convergence
• OpenStack Newton with secure bare metal performance and containers
• Snapd 2.16 delivers apps to a wide range of Linux servers, devices, and desktops
• More than 500 snaps published, with updates directly to end-users from ISVs
• Performance improvements in network and virtualisation for throughput, latency

One of the things that Canonical is touting with this release is a sneak preview session of Unity 8 (available if you log out of the desktop and select it before logging in). I'll be honest though, I personally don't like the way it looks or feels but since it's in the early stages, I'm hoping that changes.

Here's a quick video showing off the Unity 8 preview:

What do you think? Are you impressed / upset / excited for Unity 8? I'd love to know your thoughts in the comments below.