14 DAY TRIAL // In only two days from the moment of writing this article, we will be able to get a very early taste of the upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system, since the first Alpha build should be released, as planned, on June 30, 2016.
That's the good news, but the bad news is that only the Ubuntu MATE, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Kylin flavors will be participating in the Ubuntu 16.10 Alpha 1 milestone. The maintainer of the rest of the official Ubuntu editions, namely Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, and Ubuntu Studio, have decided to enroll only in the Final Beta.
"So far from what I have seen, Lubuntu and Ubuntu MATE are the only flavors interested in releasing an Alpha 1 image. Do any other flavors plan on joining in?" asked Simon Quigley. "For completeness, Ubuntu MATE intend to participate in Alpha 1, Alpha 2, Beta 1 and Final Beta," answered Martin Wimpress, Ubuntu MATE project leader.
The maintainer of the Ubuntu Kylin flavor also offered a positive response to the Alpha 1 presence, and the Ubuntu GNOME team can't decide yet if the distro will jump on the Alpha 2 or Beta 1 bandwagon because they are waiting for the GTK 3.20 and GNOME 3.20 components to land first in the Ubuntu 16.10 repositories.
Of course, one cannot blame the developers of the respective distributions for not participating in the early Alpha or Beta releases, because there's a lot of work involved in producing and thoroughly testing those ISO images for various hardware architectures, not to mention that Ubuntu 16.10 won't be an impressive release.
The fact of the matter is that the development cycle of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) has been pretty quiet. The kernel packages are still based on those of Ubuntu 16.10 (Xenial Xerus), at least for the Alpha 1 milestone, and there are almost no changes or major updates involved at this time.
Ubuntu 16.10 to be powered by Linux kernel 4.8
We've been monitoring the Ubuntu 16.10 development daily and will continue to do so until the final release of the operating system lands later this year on October 20, 2016. Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) will ship with Linux kernel 4.8 and the Unity 8 Tech Preview session installed and ready for use from the login screen.
Please visit us again in two days, on June 30, as we will announce the availability of the Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 1, Lubuntu 16.10 Alpha 1, and Ubuntu Kylin 16.10 Alpha 1 operating systems. You will be able to download the Live ISO images and take each flavor for a test drive on your personal computer.
