GNOME's Initial Setup utility is now included by enabled

Aug 26, 2016 00:12 GMT  ·  By

The development cycle of the Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 operating system started a while ago, but we are now able to take the upcoming release for a test drive by downloading today's Beta 1 build.

Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 Beta 1 was released earlier as part of the Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) launch, and it looks like the development team worked very hard to migrate the GNOME desktop environment, which is used by default in this official Ubuntu flavor, as well as most of the related applications to the GNOME 3.20 Stack.

Best of all, it appears that certain GNOME apps have been updated to the GNOME 3.22 Beta Stack, which sounds quite promising for the upcoming distribution. We've always loved to see the newest GNOME desktop environment release in a new Ubuntu GNOME release as soon as it was out.

Empathy IM has been removed from the ISOs

Among other interesting changes implemented in the Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 Beta release, we can mention that the Empathy IM client was removed from the ISO images, the new GNOME Characters tool is now installed by default, along with GNOME's Initial Setup utility, which lets users configure their installations more easily.

You'll also find an experimental Wayland session (accessible from the login screen), and the recently released LibreOffice 5.2 office suite, which uses the latest GTK3 version by default. Other than that, Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 Beta is still powered by the Linux 4.4 LTS kernel from Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS.

"If your computer supports open source graphics drivers, choose GNOME on Wayland from the gear menu below the password entry from on the login screen," reads the announcement. "Many other bugs have been fixed. Where possible, many bug fixes have been backported to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS."

If you want to help the Ubuntu GNOME team identify other bug fixes that can be backported from Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), we recommend download the 64-bit or 32-bit Live ISO images of Ubuntu GNOME 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) Beta 1 release right now via our website.