The first packages have landed for Ubuntu 16.04

Oct 27, 2015 14:54 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu developers have already started to work on the 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and the first packages are beginning to land. It's a long way to go until the stable launch in April 2016, but this is how it starts.

As usual, the Ubuntu developers commence by pulling the latest package from Debian 9, "Stretch," which is the development branch of Debian. From there, they proceed to adapt their technologies to the Debian packages and the development cycle starts once more. Canonical has been doing this for many years, so this is the way it's been done.

In any case, it will be a long while until Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) shows some notable changes and improvements. It will look and feel pretty much the same for many months, and there will be a time when the daily builds won't even work.

This situation is normal and part of the development process, and one of the reasons why it's not usually recommended to install the new OS before it's ready or at least before the feature freeze is set in place.

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) to land in April 2016

Most of the Ubuntu users choose to use the LTS version of the Ubuntu operating system because it comes with five years of support and that's a feature always nice to have. Even so, a new LTS version is made available every two years, which means that a lot of people will migrate from one LTS to another at roughly two-year intervals.

The Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) development cycle has just begun, and the first packages have started to land. The next step is to have daily build versions, and that will happen in the coming weeks. For now, we can only hope that the next Ubuntu will be more exciting than the current one.