14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu 14.10 Beta 1 (Utopic Unicorn) is expected to arrive this week and various Ubuntu flavors will make their appearance.
This release window is only used by a few Ubuntu flavors and not even the base operating system will be making an appearance. Canonical no longer provides intermediary releases of their system, with the exception of a final Beta that arrives a few weeks before the official version is launched.
They do, however, provide daily images for Ubuntu, which reflect very well the development stages of the operating system. It's very similar to the rolling release model and they don't need to do a Beta.
"So Beta 1 is this week and I'll be taking care of the builds and paperwork. Could participating flavours please get in touch here or on IRC? In the mean time, I'm going to assume a participation similar to Alpha-2 and configure cron, propose-migration and the tracker accordingly, then build a first candidate for each of your flavours," wrote Canonical's Stéphane Graber.
Some of the distros will announce their participation in the Beta release (GNOME already confirmed), but other will stay out of it. There are also a couple of them which don't even bother with other releases beside LTS.
Stay tuned for more information about the upcoming Ubuntu release.