14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier today, September 28, 2016, Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Final Beta, which is also the Beta 2 snapshot for some of the opt-in flavors, including Kubuntu.
That's right, Kubuntu 16.10 sees its first public beta release today, as the development team had a hard time working and testing the upcoming operating system against the latest KDE Plasma technologies. Therefore, Kubuntu 16.10 Beta 2 ships with the KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment by default.
Believe it or not, today's Beta 2 milestone is the first development version released for the Kubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system, and users are finally able to see what's going on with the next major release of their favorite Linux-based operating system.
"Plasma 5, the next generation of KDE's desktop has been rewritten to make it smoother to use while retaining the familiar setup. The seventh set of updates to Plasma 5 (current release, including the fixpack) is the default in this version of Kubuntu," reads today's announcement.
Still using the KDE Applications 15.08 software suite
Under the hood, Kubuntu 16.10 Beta 2 ships with the same Linux 4.8 kernel packages as the rest of the official Yakkety Yak flavors, but it seems that users will still use old applications from the KDE Applications 15.12.3 software suite. However, it looks like Kubuntu 16.10 Beta 2 also includes 107 apps that have been ported to KDE Frameworks 5.24.0.
As for the non-KDE applications, Kubuntu 16.10 Beta 2 includes the LibreOffice 5.2.1 office suite and Mozilla Firefox 48.0 web browser, which are pretty new versions. We believe that the final release of Kubuntu 16.10 will ship with the latest KDE Applications 16.08, KDE Plasma 5.7.5, and KDE Frameworks 5.26.0 technologies.
Until then, you can help the Kubuntu team with the testing of the Beta 2 by downloading the 64- or 32-bit Live ISO images right now via our website. Don't forget that this is a pre-release version, so you should not install it on your production-ready computer(s).
