14 DAY TRIAL // Today, April 13, 2017, Canonical released the final version of the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system, which has been in development for the past six months, since last October's launch of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak).
If you've been using Ubuntu 16.10 on your personal computer(s) until today, the time has come to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04, which is a powerful release, both inside and outside. It's powered by the latest stable Linux 4.10 kernel series, and ships with an up-to-date graphics stack based on X.Org Server 1.19.3 and Mesa 17.0.3.
Only these three new technologies mentioned above are the only reason some of you out there gaming with AMD Radeon graphics cards need to upgrade to Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) right now. But the operating system ships only with up-to-date components and applications.
The default desktop environment remains Unity 7, so your beloved Ubuntu desktop environment is not going anyway at the moment. It will also be available in the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 release, whose development will start next month. After that, starting with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the GNOME desktop will be used by default.
Driverless printing, swap files, 32-bit PowerPC support dropped
Among other interesting features shipping with the final release of Ubuntu 17.04, we can mention the implementation of swap files, which are used instead of a swap partition only for new installations of the operating system. So this change is the only one that won't apply if you're upgrading from a previous Ubuntu release.
Moreover, the default DNS resolver was switched to systemd-resolved, IPP Everywhere and Apple AirPrint printers are now supported out of the box for a driverless printing experience, and most of the packages from the GNOME Stack were upgraded to GNOME 3.24, though Nautilus remains at version 3.20.4.
The gconf utility is no longer installed by default because it is now superseded by gsettings, and among the latest apps installed, we can mention the LibreOffice 5.3 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 52.0.1 web browser, as well as Mozilla Thunderbird 45.8.0 email and news client.
Support for 32-bit PowerPC (PPC) architectures has been officially dropped from this release and won't make a comeback. However, PPC64el (PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian) support continues. Ubuntu 17.04 is available for download right now from our website and comes with both 64-bit (amd64) and 32-bit ISO (i386) images.
The rest of the official flavors are starting to appear as well today. These include Ubuntu GNOME 17.04, Ubuntu MATE 17.04, Kubuntu 17.04, Xubuntu 17.04, Lubuntu 17.04, Ubuntu Kylin 17.04, Ubuntu Studio 17.04, as well as Ubuntu Budgie 17.04, which makes its debut as an official Ubuntu flavor built around the Budgie desktop.
As usual, we'll have separate articles on the website for most of them, so stay tuned right here on Softpedia Linux for the latest Ubuntu news. Please note that the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) release is a short-lived branch supported with security updates for only nine months, from today until mid-January 2018.
