14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds released the first RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the Linux 4.15 kernel series kicking off the development cycle after the standard two-week merge window since Linux kernel 4.14 LTS.
It's been two weeks since the long-term supported Linux 4.14 kernel series launched and it already received two maintenance updates, which means it's now ready to take over GNU/Linux distributions worldwide as Linux kernel 4.13 reached end of life last week and users now need to move to Linux 4.14 LTS.
During this time, the kernel developers pushed a lot of new features to the upcoming Linux 4.15 kernel branch, but the merge window is now officially closed, and public testers can get an early taste by downloading the first Release Candidate from kernel.org, compile and install it on their favorite distros.
"The good news is that almost all major updates did come in during the first week," said Linus Torvalds in the mailing list announcement. "A big "Thank you" for that to the people involved. I could start my travels seeing that I only had a few hundred commits in linux-next that hadn't been merged already."
Linux kernel 4.15 expected to arrive in mid-January 2018
If the development cycle of the Linux 4.15 kernel goes smooth, which means the Christmas and New Year's Eve events won't stand in its way too much, and only seven RCs are released, we should expect to see the final release hitting stable in mid-January 2018, more precisely on January 14.
Linus Torvalds is hopeful that Linux kernel 4.15 won't have the "calming-down" delays of the Linux 4.14 LTS kernel and will arrive on time. Anyway, development just kicked off, so it's going to be a long and adventurous road until the final release, and you can help by testing this first RC on on your personal computer.