Edubuntu 23.10 Released!

Erich Eickmeyer eeickmeyer at ubuntu.com
Thu Oct 12 17:43:30 UTC 2023 

edubuntu-23.10_banner

We are pleased to announce the latest release of Edubuntu 23.10 codename 
Manic Minotaur. Edubuntu has really been received with open arms and we 
are excited to have this available once again. It’s been a labor of 
love, and we would especially like to thank Aaron Prisk for helping with 
our website.

We’ve also received some help from a special guy of ours, Jonny 
Eickmeyer. Jonny is our son and has been a great “Guinea Pig” regarding 
testing out games and learning apps in Edubuntu. His feedback and 
contribution to the project has been invaluable in shaping it into what 
young users are looking for.

We hope you enjoy this latest version of Edubuntu as much as we enjoyed 
working on it.

This release will be supported for nine months (Until July 2024).

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    *Downloads*

Images may be downloaded 
fromhttps://cdimages.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/23.10/release<https://cdimages.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/releases/23.10/release>.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    *What’s New (Compared to 23.04)*

This release is meant to be evolutionary, not revolutionary. We are 
still working out which applications and features work best in the 
overall educational ecosystem. As always, feedback is appreciated.

*New Apps*

  * *Startup Disk Creator*: This will help users and administrators make
    an easy USB drive from a .iso image of any Ubuntu flavor.
  * *GNOME Videos*: Video player
  * *GNOME Music*: Music player
  * *Backup*: Backup utility
  * *Basic256*: Teaches students the BASIC programming language
    (@eeickmeyer <https://discourse.ubuntu.com/u/eeickmeyer>, our
    technical lead, first learned to program in this language when he
    was 10 years old on a Commodore VIC-20!)
  * *Extension Manager*: An easy way to add and administer GNOME Shell
    extensions.
  * *OpenBoard*: A whiteboard application for teachers
  * *Mnemosyne*: A flashcard application
  * *Convertall*: A powerful standalone unit converter (Bonus: GNOME
    Shell can also convert units, just ask it!)

OnBoard
OpenBoard

*Bugfixes*

  * *Edubuntu Menu Administratior*can now hide snaps
  * KDE/Qt apps now respect dark/light settings of the desktop. However,
    they still only use a blue accent color. Theongoing discussions
    <https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/issues/26>on how to solve
    this previously mentioned in theEdubuntu 23.04 Beta Known Issues
    <https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/edubuntu-23-04-beta-released/34861>have
    stalled.

*Known Issues*

  * KDE/Qt apps use a blue accent color as opposed to a red accent color
    or whatever accent color is set by the user in the System Settings.
    There is no known fix currently, however future releases may have
    other configurations which allow this. There areongoing
    discussions<https://invent.kde.org/teams/vdg/issues/-/issues/26>that
    seem to have come to a halt.
  * The system installer (Ubiquity) provides a minimal install option
    that is currently work-in-progress.
  * GNOME Notes has a search provider for the Activities Overview which
    willsometimes crash <https://launchpad.net/bugs/2012985>.
  * As Edubuntu shares a desktop with and is based on Ubuntu Desktop,
    any known issues can be found in the officialUbuntu Release
    Notes<https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/mantic-minotaur-release-notes/>.
  * Individual applications included with Edubuntu may have their own
    known issues. Please consult upstream release notes for those
    applications before filing bug reports.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    *Future Goals*

At this time, we were focusing less on the client-server model of old. 
While centralized management for multi-computer environments and large 
organizations certainly is a distant goal, it isn’t as immediate as 
getting this into the hands of individuals and small organizations.

In the next release cycle, we hope to start working on Raspberry Pi 
images. A donor has been kind enough to donate the Edubuntu project a 
Rapberry Pi 5 in order to accomplish this goal so that we can start 
testing any images we produce. This is also being done with the help of 
certain team members at Canonical. (Note that Edubuntu is not a direct 
project of Canonical).

Another goal will be to implement a new system installer: the same one 
that is currently used by Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Budgie. It is a 
Flutter GUI wrapper for subiquity which is the same installer used to 
install Ubuntu Server. By combining these efforts, we hope to help 
sunset the old Python-based Ubiquity installer so that we can continue 
forward with the rest of the Ubuntu community.

We have two other goals to implement in the next cycle that will be of 
major interest to students and teachers alike:

  * We want to create a teacher-centered metapackage to provide teachers
    with the tools they need to effectively instruct and create
    assignments for their students. At least one of these applications
    is included in the form of OpenBoard, but many more tools are out there.
  * Partnering with Ubuntu Studio, we want to create a Music Education
    metapackage, consisting of many tools already existing in Ubuntu
    Studio but also found in the Ubuntu repositories.

We realize these are big goals just before our first long-term support 
(LTS) release in 10 years (!), but we knew this would be the case when 
bringing this project back from its nine-year hiatus. That said, we are 
excited to make our next release of Edubuntu an LTS release, which we 
plan to support for 3 years.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    *How To Contact or Participate*

*Mailing Lists*
Edubuntu Users Mailing List 
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-users>(Support 
Discussion)
Edubuntu Developers Mailing 
List<https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel>(Join The 
Team!)

*Social Media*
Twitter <https://twitter.com/edubuntuproject>
Mastodon <https://ubuntu.social/@edubuntu>


    *We Have a Merchandise Shop!1 <https://edubuntu.myspreadshop.com/>*

Buy a t-shirt, coffee mug, hat, teddy bear, or anything available! 
Browse and find something you like! Commissions support ongoing development!

------------------------------------------------------------------------


    *Special Thanks*

Huge thanks for this release go to:

  * *Aaron Prisk*: Temporary Website, Website Maintenance
  * *Steve Langasek*: Technical Guidance, Release Team
  * *Jeremy Bicha*: GNOME Desktop Guidance
  * *Oliver Grawert*: Project Founder, encouragement
  * *Jonny Eickmeyer*: Testing/Child’s Perspective/Advice
  * *Erich Eickmeyer*: Technical Leader, Merch Store
  * *Amy Eickmeyer*: Project Leader
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/edubuntu-devel/attachments/20231012/634cd274/attachment-0001.html>

More information about the edubuntu-devel mailing list