14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth named the next major release of the Ubuntu Linux operating system as "Bionic Beaver," and now the Ubuntu Kernel team shares some insights of what will be the default Linux kernel of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now open for development, and during the next six months, it will receive a lot of updates for almost all the packages and core components that are usually shipped by default with Ubuntu. Linux kernel being the most important part of a GNU/Linux operating system, it's the first thing discussed at the beginning of a new development cycle, and it looks like Linux 4.15 will be used for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS by default.
"Every 6 months the Ubuntu Kernel Team is tasked to pick the kernel to be used in the next release. This is a difficult thing to do because we don’t definitively know what will be going into the upstream kernel over the next 6 months nor the quality of that kernel," said the Ubuntu Kernel team in their latest weekly report. "Taking all of that into account we are tentatively planning to converge on 4.15 for the Bionic Beaver 18.04 LTS release."
GNOME 3.28 to be used as default desktop environment
One thing we have to say about Canonical's decision to ship Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) with the Linux 4.15 kernel, and that's the fact that the next Linux kernel release coming in two weeks, namely Linux 4.14, will also be an LTS (Long Term Support) version, so it would be wise to ship an LTS release of Ubuntu with an LTS Linux kernel branch that gets support for a lot of years these days, probably as long as Ubuntu 18.04 LTS five years of support.
That being said, it looks like the default desktop environment of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is GNOME 3.28, whose development already started last week with the first snapshot, GNOME 3.27.1. The final release of the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment is expected on March 14, 2018, and its first point release will arrive on April 4. Canonical plans to release Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) on April 26, 2018.