Many curious readers will have tried Unity 8 on 16.10 and then realised exactly how far away it was from being ready for prime-time. Few topics are as divisive in the Ubuntu community as Unity, with many mourning its passing and just as many celebrating. So what are we to expect from the new release of the world’s most widely used Linux distribution? It’s worth mentioning first what not to expect – despite widespread speculation to the contrary, Unity 8 is not the default desktop environment for this release – and with Canonical’s new move towards Cloud and IoT technologies, it never will be. If the potential for instability is an issue, that is why the LTS releases exist. As a non-LTS release (the next version with long-term support will be 18.04), Zesty will receive only nine months of official support but will be more ‘cutting edge’, which means more of the latest features, but potentially more bugs.

Its release brings the number of currently supported versions for Ubuntu up to an impressive four – the new release will sit alongside the most recent version – 16.10 and the two current LTS (Long Time Support) versions, 14.04 LTS and 16.04 LTS.

I took the view that, if convergence was the future and we could deliver it as free software, that would be widely appreciated both in the free software community and in the technology industry Īpwas the release date for Zesty Zapus, version 17.04 of the Ubuntu Linux operating system from Canonical.

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