14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Alan Pope invites the Ubuntu community today to download and test out the latest daily build ISO images of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system to report if things are working correctly or not on their PCs.
Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) is currently under heavy work, and we're keeping you guys up-to-date with its development as best as we can. For example, we were the first to report two weeks ago that GDM replaced LightDM as default login manager, and you should already know that GNOME Shell is now the default desktop environment, replacing Unity 7, which is available for installation from the repos.
We also reported at the end of June on the first Alpha images of Ubuntu 17.10 being released for several opt-in flavors including Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Ubuntu Kylin, but the upcoming Ubuntu release will get a second Alpha milestone later this month, on July 27, so it looks like it's time for you guys to take it for a spin on your personal computers and report any issues you may experiencing.
Here's how you can help test out Ubuntu 17.10
Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) is launching on October 19, 2017, and if you want it to be the best release ever, some things need to be tested out gradually and carefully to be sure everything works out-of-the-box. Keep in mind though that there's a big difference between the Unity 7 interface that was shipping in previous Ubuntu releases and the GNOME desktop environment.
If you didn't like GNOME before, but you love Ubuntu, you'll have to get used to the GNOME Shell interface, which can be easily tweaked and bent to your needs. After all, Unity 7 was based on the GNOME Stack, so you'll still enjoy those beautiful apps. Now that Unity is gone, Ubuntu embraced the next-generation Wayland display server, so there's now an Ubuntu on Wayland session that needs testing.
OK, so here's how you can help! The Ubuntu Desktop Team wants you to download the latest Ubuntu 17.10 daily builds, for either 64-bit or 32-bit computers, write the image to a USB flash drive, install the operating system on your PC, and test out a few things, such as the new Ubuntu on Wayland session, and see how it works on daily basis (hint: some apps like Synaptics might not start).
You can also test Ubuntu 17.10 with external displays or Bluetooth devices, especially audio ones, if you have any on hand, as well as to try and see if the suspend and resume operations work as expected. The Ubuntu Desktop Team also wants you to see how Wi-Fi and Wired connections work, and don't hesitate to submit bugs following the instructions provided by Alan Pope on his latest blog post.
