14 DAY TRIAL // With MWC 2016 behind us, we can now concentrate our attention on the upcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system for desktops, servers, cloud, and mobile and embedded devices.
The first Beta release launches today, February 25, 2016, for several opt-in flavors, including Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Studio, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu.
The announcement received by Softpedia a few minutes ago informs us about the immediate availability for download of Live ISO images for supported architectures of the flavors mentioned above.
"Beta 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. This is quite an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs," said the developers.
The biggest new feature of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Beta 1 release would be the inclusion of Linux kernel 4.4.2 LTS, which brings support for the latest hardware and security enhancements.
However, we have detailed articles on Softpedia with the new features implemented in the Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS Beta 1, Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS Beta 1, Lubuntu 16.04 LTS Beta 1, and Ubuntu Kylin 16.04 LTS Beta 1 flavors.
Final Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Beta launches March 24
The development cycle of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) will continue with the final Beta build, which according to the official release schedule, it should be available for public testing on March 24, and Ubuntu itself will also be available for download.
Until then, you can download Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS Beta 1, Ubuntu Kylin 16.04 LTS Beta 1, Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS Beta 1, Ubuntu Studio 16.04 Beta 1, Ubuntu Cloud 16.04 LTS Beta 1, Xubuntu 16.04 LTS Beta 1, and Lubuntu 16.04 LTS Beta 1.
As usual, keep in mind that a Beta build may contain bugs, so if you encouter some please report them as soon as possible. However, we don't recommedn installing it on any of your production-ready systems.