14 DAY TRIAL // Today's Ubuntu 17.10 Alpha 1 release for opt-in flavors brought us previews of the upcoming Kubuntu 17.10, Lubuntu 17.10, and Ubuntu Kylin 17.10 operating systems.
In the last several weeks, Lubuntu maintainer Simon Quigley kept us up-to-date with the development of the Lubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, which appears to be the first release shipping with separate LXDE and LXQt editions, the latter being dubbed as "Lubuntu Next."
Powered by Linux kernel 4.10, X.Org Server 1.19.3, Mesa 17.1.2, and systemd 233, the first Alpha build of Lubuntu 17.10 and Lubuntu Next 17.10 is here to give users a sneak peek at what's coming to the final release, which is hitting the streets later this year on October 19, 2017, along with the rest of the official Ubuntu 17.10 flavors.
Lubuntu Next 17.10 using MPV and SMPlayer as default media players
While the LXDE-based Lubuntu 17.10 Alpha 1 images are pretty much unchanged from the latest stable release of the operating system, namely Lubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), the Lubuntu Next 17.10 Alpha 1 Live ISOs are the main attraction, and it looks like they come pre-loaded with a lot of Qt-based apps, based on Qt 5.7.1 as the devs are still working on the latest Qt 5.9 packages.
First off, you should know that Lubuntu Next 17.10 Alpha 1 is built on top of the LXQt 0.11.1 desktop environment. As for the pre-installed apps, we can mention MPV and SMPlayer media players, Calibre ebook library manager, LibreOffice office suite, JuffEd text editor, Qtransmission BitTorrent client, and QupZilla web browser.
KDE's K3b CD/DVD/BD burning software, LXDE's LXTerminal terminal emulator, Synaptic Package Manager, Gparted partition editor, SMTube YouTube video browser and player, Quassel IRC client, as well as the Muon and Discover package managers from KDE are included as well by default in Lubuntu Next 17.10 Alpha 1.
If you want to test the first Alpha release of either Lubuntu 17.10 or Lubuntu Next 17.10, you can download the Live ISO images or the Alternate ISOs for 32-bit or 64-bit architectures right now from our website. However, please don't install them on production machines as they are pre-release versions of Alpha quality.
