October is around the corner so a new Ubuntu version is getting ready. See the Release Notes. The control buttons for each window are moved back to the right top after seven years and Unity has been replaced by Gnome 3.26 so you might be a bit discombobulated by user interface changes. The standard issue image won’t include a 32 bit version so you’ll need to download the Lubuntu or other flavor if you are restricted to older hardware like the EEE PC I’m using for the hamshack PC.
Wayland is replacing X. You can “echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE” at the command line to see what you are running. Wayland comes with some obnoxious security, too. If you want to sudo gvim or gparted, you get errors unless you “xhost -si:localuser:root” first. This is about getting some applications that need root access up to date on the new, and supposedly more secure, methods for doing that. You can still switch back to X if you’ve got problems with Wayland. So far Wayland is more promise than reality and doesn’t offer much in terms of noticeable improvement. It’s promise is what will happen as it keeps developers happy with such things as its differences in security and graphics models.
It looks like mount.cifs has had a default SMB protocol version change which might mess up mounting windows shares. This doesn’t bother nautilus access via its ‘Other Locations -> Networks’ but it will bother autofs which I use to access the network storage. I am not sure if this is the old Netgear NAS that doesn’t understand the newer protocols or is a bug in mount.cifs but I regained access by adding “vers=1.0” to the mount options. This gets, again, into security issues (I think). Nautilus uses Fuse filesystem access which is a ‘user space’ technique. CIFS is a kernel involved standard file system mount which means it needs special attention to owner, group, and user permissions and how they meld into the Windows type permissions set up by the NAS.
Otherwise, things are looking good.