14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Steve Langasek announced on Friday that the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system has officially entered feature freeze development stages as of March 1, 2018.
The feature freeze stage in the development of a Linux-based operating system means that the upcoming release won't receive any new features or major updated packages except for those that fix critical bugs. As such, the Ubuntu Release Team uploaded all packages to the bionic-proposed repository before the feature freeze deadline on March 1, 2018.
The problem is, over 800 packages are currently stuck in the bionic-proposed repo. In comparison, there were only 110 packages waiting in the proposed repo at the end of Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark)'s development cycle. As such, Canonical urges all developers and contributors to resolve any issues and free as many packages as possible until next week's beta release.
"It's been a busy cycle, and there are quite a lot of transitions still in progress; the 822 packages waiting in bionic-proposed today is a far cry from the 110 package minimum at the end of the artful cycle. Please help wherever possible by resolving broken tests, uninstallable packages, and build failures," said Steve Langasek.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Beta coming March 8 for opt-in flavors
The development cycle of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, which will be Canonical's seventh LTS (Long Term Support) release supported for the next five years, was indeed very busy and quite stressful for the Ubuntu engineers, especially for flavors, as they did not manage to release any of the two scheduled Alpha milestones.
The next phase in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS' development cycle is the first beta release, which will only be made available for the opt-in flavors like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, etc. The Beta 1 release is currently scheduled for March 8, according to the official release schedule, and will give users the ability to test drive the upcoming operating systems.
After that, the Final Beta is coming early April, on the 5th, when Ubuntu will participate as well, finally becoming available for public testing ahead of its April 26 launch. Being an LTS release, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will focus mostly on stability and reliability than new features. It will be powered by the latest Linux 4.15 kernel and come with the upcoming GNOME 3.28 desktop environment by default.
Another important aspect of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system is that it will ship with the old X.Org Server display server by default instead of the next-generation Wayland, which is currently used on the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will also include a new "Minimal Installation" feature and the GNOME To Do app.