Most of the official spins have participated in this release

Jan 27, 2017 21:07 GMT  ·  By

Canonical has released today the second Alpha of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system, which, in fact, is the first Alpha of the new series.

What happened to the first Alpha? Well, it was scheduled to land last year on December 29, but because most of the developers were busy with the Christmas and New Year's holidays, they decided it was best to cancel it and focus on the next Alpha.

So you can call today's development build "Alpha 2," but in fact, this is the first and only Alpha that will be released for the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) series. As usual, only opt-in flavors participate in these early development versions, so no Ubuntu here.

This Alpha release will offer users an early taste of the upcoming Ubuntu Budgie 17.04, Ubuntu GNOME 17.04, Ubuntu MATE 17.04, Ubuntu Kylin 17.04, Kubuntu 17.04, and Lubuntu 17.04.

What's new in Ubuntu 17.04 Alpha 2 opt-in flavors

All these Alpha 2 flavors are powered by Linux kernel 4.9.5 (4.9.0-15.16), but the changes in each one are kept to a minimum at this time. For example, Lubuntu 17.04 Alpha 2 still doesn't ship with the LXQt desktop environment.

Ubuntu Kylin 17.04 Alpha 2 fixes many internationalization and localization bugs, Kubuntu 17.04 Alpha 2 is using the latest KDE Plasma 5.8.5 LTS, KDE Applications 16.12.1, and KDE Frameworks 5.30.0 technologies.

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 Alpha 2 appears to have the most improvements due to their recent migration to the GNOME 3.22 Stack. It now includes the Flatpak 0.8 applications sandboxing framework and the chrome-gnome-shell system helper.

For Ubuntu Budgie, this Alpha is its first release as official flavor. It ships with the Budgie 10.2.9 desktop environment, AppIndicator support, Terminix as default terminal, and the latest budgie-welcome app with the project's browser ballot screen.

Linux kernel 4.10 in testing, Ubuntu 17.04 to launch April 13

In the meantime, the Ubuntu Kernel team is tracking the development of Linux kernel 4.10, and they recently announced the availability of an updated kernel for Ubuntu 17.04 based on the Linux 4.10 RC5 release.

The development cycle of Ubuntu 17.04 will continue with the first Beta version on February 23, also for opt-in flavors. A second, and also the final Beta release will be published a month later, on March 23, and Ubuntu will participate as well.

The final release of Ubuntu 17.04 is expected to launch on April 13, 2017, for all official flavors, including the new Ubuntu Budgie, which should use the upcoming Budgie 11 desktop environment.

All these Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) Alpha 2 flavors are now available for download, but please note that they also ship with numerous known issues. Therefore, we don't recommend installing them on your personal computers, only in virtual machines.