14 DAY TRIAL // We've reported earlier on the release of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) Final Beta, as well as the Beta 2 milestone for the opt-in flavors, including Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS.
Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS Beta 2 is a small maintenance release compared with the first Beta build, bringing the same GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, with the GNOME Shell 3.18 and most of GNOME 3.18's core components, despite the fact that GNOME 3.20 was officially released on March 23, 2016.
The good thing is that Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS now uses the GNOME Software as default graphical package manager instead of Ubuntu Software Center, and the GNOME Calendar and GNOME Logs applications have been installed by default. Additionally, users can find the GNOME Builder IDE in the main repositories.
Among other changes, we can notice that Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS Beta 2 fixes the Sharing panel in GNOME Control Center, along with various issues with the installation of language packs and the iBus support. As expected, the long-term supported Linux kernel 4.4.6 is onboard.
An experimental Wayland session is present
Lastly, Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS Beta 2 ships with an experimental Wayland session, but it's not enabled by default, which means that users need to install the gnome-session-wayland package to be able to select the "GNOME on Wayland" session from the login screen.
Please note that the Wayland session only works with open-source graphics drivers. You can download Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS Beta 2 right now from our website, where it is distributed as 64-bit and 32-bit Live ISO images. But before attempting to install the Beta 2 build, please note that there are many known issues present.