The final release is launching April 26, 2018

Oct 27, 2017 17:37 GMT  ·  By

In a mailing list announcement published on Friday, Canonical's Matthias Klose announced that the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system is now officially open for development.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is the next long-term supported release of Ubuntu, which Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth dubbed as the "Bionic Beaver." According to the release schedule, the toolchain was uploaded on October 26, 2017, and development kicks off today, October 27, with APT, DPKG, and Debhelper merges.

In addition, there were a few library transitions, including for Boost 1.65, ICU, and libcdio, but before they getting deeper into the development cycle of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the Ubuntu developers will first concentrate on fixing various remaining issues from the recently released Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.

"Before heading on with Bionic Beaver, let's have a look at all the remaining build failures in Artful Aardvark, which is the highest number of build failures at the end of a release cycle we ever had.  Please don't repeat that and plan to address these build failures in time for the Bionic Beaver release," said Matthias Klose.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS leverages GNOME 3.28 Stack and Linux 4.15 kernel

During its entire development cycle, the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system will leverage the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment, whose development kicked off last week with the first milestone (GNOME 3.27.1), as well as the Linux 4.15 kernel series, but not before rebasing the OS to the upcoming Linux kernel 4.14 LTS.

The final release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is expected next year, on April 26, but, until then, we will be able to test drive the daily builds or participate in the Alpha and Beta testing parties. We'll try to cover the entire, six-month development cycle of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) as best as possible, right here on Softpedia Linux.