14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Steve Langasek announced on Friday that the upcoming Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) operating system has officially entered Feature Freeze and Debian Import Freeze development stages as of August 23rd, 2018.
The Feature Freeze stage is a very important step in the development of a GNU/Linux distribution, signaling the fact that the new features have already landed for the final release and that developers should now concentrate their efforts only on addressing critical bugs and other issues that might block the final release.
At this point, there won't be any major new features or updated packages except for those that fix bugs. However, there are currently more than 870 packages stuck in the cosmic-proposed repository, so developers and contributors are now urged to resolve any issues and free as many packages as possible until the beta release.
"We again have a very busy -proposed with transitions in progress; with 873 packages in cosmic-proposed today, we are even a little behind where we were at this point in the cycle for Bionic. We made good progress on clearing out bionic-proposed before the Bionic release, and with some effort, we can do the same again for Cosmic," said Steve Langasek.
Ubuntu 18.10 beta slated for release on September 27, 2018
With the Feature Freeze in effect, the next significant milestone in the release schedule of the Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) operating system is the beta version, which is slated for release a month from the moment of writing this article, on September 27, 2018, and will be available for Ubuntu and all opt-in flavors.
Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) is the first release of the popular Linux OS that has a simpler and, apparently, more efficient development cycle consisting of several and optional so-called "Testing Weeks" and a single beta release before the final release, which will hit the streets on October 18, 2018.
A testbed for Canonical to try various new technologies, Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) will be powered by the Linux 4.17 kernel series, feature various components of the forthcoming GNOME 3.30 desktop environment, Android integration, a brand-new theme and icon set, new login screen, and zstd lossless data compression algorithm support.
Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) also promises much-better power consumption for laptops by tweaking low-level kernel options for switching off disk drives and USB controllers when they're not used, as well as media sharing improvements with better compatibility for DLNA-capable smart devices and easy SMB (Samba) share creation.