Ubuntu MATE, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Kylin have been released

Jul 28, 2016 21:00 GMT  ·  By

Today, July 28, 2016, Canonical, through Simon Quigley, has had the pleasure of announcing the general availability for testing of the second Alpha build of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) for opt-in flavors.

If it's for opt-in flavors, it means that Ubuntu itself hasn't been released as part of this Alpha development cycle, and that only some of the official editions of the popular GNU/Linux operating system used by millions of people around the globe have participated in today's Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Alpha 2 milestone.

These are Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2, Lubuntu 16.10 Alpha 2, and Ubuntu Kylin 16.10 Alpha 2. As expected, all of them borrow the up-to-date GNU/Linux technologies that Canonical implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 operating system, due for release on October 13, 2016.

"The second alpha of the Yakkety Yak (to become 16.10) has now been released. This milestone features images for Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Kylin," says Simon Quigley. "Alpha 2 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. This is still an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs."

What's new in Ubuntu 16.10 Alpha 2

We've been monitoring the development cycle of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system since day one, and we can tell you that, for now, the Alpha 2 milestone doesn't bring any major changes compared with the stable version, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), which has already received its first point release earlier in the week.

And no, the kernel packages have not been upgraded to the Linux 4.6 kernel series, nor the brand new Linux kernel 4.7 released on July 24, 2016. Therefore, Ubuntu 16.10 Alpha 2 remains powered by Linux kernel 4.4 LTS, the same one used in Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS. However, the maintainers of the Ubuntu flavors who have participated in the Alpha 2 release have made various changes on their own.

If you're curious to know what's new in the Ubuntu MATE, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Kylin 16.10 Alpha 2 releases, please click on the links above as we wrote separate articles for some of them with all the juicy details. In the meantime, you can download Lubuntu 16.10 Alpha 2, Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Alpha 2, and Ubuntu Kylin 16.10 Alpha 2 Live ISO images for 64-bit and 32-bit computers right now via our website.