Ubuntu Linux 16.10 'Yakkety Yak' Beta 1 Now Available For Download (betanews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BetaNews: Today, the first beta of Ubuntu Linux 16.10 sees release. Once again, a silly animal name is assigned, this time being the letter "Y" for the horned mammal, "Yakkety Yak." This is also a play on the classic song "Yakety Yak" by The Coasters. Please be sure not to "talk back" while testing this beta operating system! "Pre-releases of the Yakkety Yak are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu flavor developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this bos grunniens ready. Beta 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. These images are still under development, so you should expect some bugs," says Set Hallstrom, Ubuntu Studio project lead. He adds: "While these Beta 1 images have been tested and work, except as noted in the release notes, Ubuntu developers are continuing to improve the Yakkety Yak. In particular, once newer daily images are available, system installation bugs identified in the Beta 1 installer should be verified against the current daily image before being reported in Launchpad. Using an obsolete image to re-report bugs that have already been fixed wastes your time and the time of developers who are busy trying to make 16.10 the best Ubuntu release yet. Always ensure your system is up to date before reporting bugs." Here are the following download links: Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio.

Comments

Don't Talk Back!

[SeaFox]

Please be sure not to "talk back" while testing this beta operating system!

I thought Canonical stopped listening to user feedback years ago anyway.

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[geek]

Please be sure not to "talk back" while testing this beta operating system!

I thought Canonical stopped listening to user feedback years ago anyway.

They listen, the problem is just that they think they know better. If they really knew better though there wouldn't be so many fucking "spins" on the default distro. You don't see that shit with any other distro, Fedora has one or two, Arch has a couple but I don't think that's apples to apples since Arch is just a base for others to build on.

Pride and arrogance are killing Ubuntu. I have a lot of love for what Ubuntu stood for once upon a time. I just wish they would get back to that and start working with the community again.

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[Dutch Gun]

"Pre-releases of the Yakkety Yak are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu flavor developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this bos grunniens ready. Beta 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. These images are still under development, so you should expect some bugs," says Set Hallstrom, Ubuntu Studio project lead. He adds: "While these Beta 1 images have been tested and work, except as noted in the release notes, Ubuntu developers are continuing to improve the Yakkety Yak. In particular, once newer daily images are available, system installation bugs identified in the Beta 1 installer should be verified against the current daily image before being reported in Launchpad. Using an obsolete image to re-report bugs that have already been fixed wastes your time and the time of developers who are busy trying to make 16.10 the best Ubuntu release yet. Always ensure your system is up to date before reporting bugs."

So... there may be some bugs then? I was a little unclear on that point.

Anyhow, it's great that the article talks about the silly name of the release, the song it's named after, and about how buggy it is, rather than talking about what sort of new features come with the latest and greatest bugs. I mean, no one gives a crap about boring things like that, right? Or did I miss a link somewhere?

Re: Don't Talk Back!

[geek]

Yes and no. I'd argue it's easier to make a desktop distro with Ubuntu as a base,

I dunno. The arch documentation is top notch. That distro is amazing as far as user education goes. Basing on Arch is possibly the smartest thing a distro can do from a documentation standpoint.

* very drunk so please excuse typos and grammar.

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[hcs_$reboot]

Anyway, not having a system dressed up in such a yakky name is a sufficient reason not to upgrade.

Re: Don't Talk Back!

[Anonymous Coward]

I reckon you've never had a look at the uodate manager options?

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[fahrbot-bot]

Please be sure not to "talk back" while testing this beta operating system!

I thought Canonical stopped listening to user feedback years ago anyway.

They listen, the problem is just that they think they know better. ... I just wish they would get back to that and start working with the community again.

Ya. Good thing that doesn't happen elsewhere... (cough) systemd (cough)

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[fph il quozientatore]

Unpopular opinion: I like Unity. have tried KDE3, Gnome2, Gnome3, XFCE, even FVWM and a couple of oddball window managers, and overall Unity is ok. Reasonably simple, stays out of the way. I think in the long run it's an improvement over the systems used by the "we've always done like that" crowd, and it has helped a lot bringing Linux on the desktop of the average user. I also like systemd.

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[thegarbz]

If they really knew better though there wouldn't be so many fucking "spins" on the default distro.

And this is one of Ubuntus greatest strengths. They've fully embraced the we'll do our thing and someone else can fork the features they don't like. The existence of a whole series of spins with a custom but completely finished experience for the user, based on the same core underlying and well funded system is far better than the "we'll create a distro and give everyone every option ever but never make it look like any kind of unified product because there's just too much there" approach.

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[cytg.net]

Just installed 16.04 after a few years away from desktop linux .. Holy crap Unity is bad.. Not like only usability bad but broken. Coming out of sleep apps will be frozen, switching apps will often time maximize windows, running more than one screen will often, coming out of sleep, make the main display scroll with the extent of the secondary display (different wakeup times) and much more.. If ANYTHING should be bug free it should be the very foundation that other apps run it, the userinterface and its just so effen broken.. I will give mate a shot, if thats the same, i dont know what to do.. If I have to fix everything myself anyway I am going BSD.

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[secretsquirel]

"I will give mate a shot, if thats the same, i dont know what to do.."

XFCE, of course.

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fedora actually has more community spins than Ubuntu (12 for Fedora vs 8 for Ubuntu). Not that it's a necessarily a good or bad thing. There are lots of reasons to create a derivative, some good, some bad. Usually the more popular projects get forked/re-spun as people like it, but want to add something. That's why Debian is so common as a base distro while there are virtually no spins of Void.

Re: Don't Talk Back!

[hawkinspeter]

You can easily control update notifications by editing /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades .

Re:Don't Talk Back!

[Blaskowicz]

One spin per desktop works with slow internet and allows to not waste gigabytes either.
I don't want to download a 4GB iso with all major desktops in it - multiply by distro versions and 32bit vs 64bit, and I now need to buy a hard drive to fill it with junk.
I don't want to wait half a hour for 4GB of mostly crap to write to the USB 2 stick.
I don't want to bring a very small iso, but download 1GB at 100KB/s with wifi brown outs.
I don't want to install KDE or Gnome 3 or Unity and not use them : daemons, registries etc. Some desktops when mixed give you two entries for "Preferences / Screensaver" for instance.

Re: Don't Talk Back!

[KozmoStevnNaut]

The Arch wiki is generally good (except for the outdated articles) and the forums can be very helpful.

But after the tenth or twentieth time your system just goes belly-up because of a borked update, and you have to reboot on a USB stick and manually try to rescue things, you get tired of their bleeding-edge package versions. This latest time, it was because a beta version of the Nvidia driver was marked as the newest stable version in the Arch repos, so Pacman cheerfully proceeded to install it. The end result upon the next reboot was a black screen and my graphics card's fan running at full tilt. I spent a couple of hours trying to fix things, but even rolling back the Nvidia driver and the kernel did nothing.

So I said "fuck it, I've had enough of being a mega-1337 Linux h4xx0r and toying around with Gentoo and Arch", and installed Linux Mint 18. Obviously I had to get used to a new system, and add a few PPAs for various applications where I needed the newest version. But so far, it's been absolutely wonderful. No fuss at all, very straight-forward and fast install process, sensible defaults for most things, very little tweaking needed.

I know there's Manjaro, which is a similarly desktop-oriented distro based on Arch instead of Ubuntu. But I felt like needed a clean break from the whole Arch thing. Besides, with my /home on a separate partition, it's not like I even had to mess around with any significant settings in any applications. Maybe I'll try Manjaro some day.

I miss the old days.

[itomato]

Why, oh why do you have to send clicks to that terrible site to make me wade through drivel about The Coasters to find out... well, basically nothing.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Yakket...

Re:I miss the old days.

[gilgongo]

Yeach you'd think they'd take at last ONE fact about new functionality or features in the new release and talk about it. You'd have to try to make it less informative.

stability where? not for servers

[iggymanz]

I like how upgrading from 12.04 LTS to 14.04 or 14.04 to 16.04 LTS breaks things because Ubuntu only tested the six month path. Forgetting directories, account name changes, etc.

Re:stability where? not for servers

[somenickname]

The funny thing is that the upgrade path was significantly broken by systemd. On a clean 16.04 machine, you can type "/etc/init.d/foo restart" and it works fine. It's just a wrapper to the correct systemd command. If, however, you upgraded your system from 12.04 to 1X.04, the upgrade process probably didn't correctly update the scripts in /etc/init.d. So, now you are stuck on a system that may or may not respond the same way that your new machines respond. Even though they are running the same damn operating system.

Systemd... The gift that keeps on giving...

Re:stability where? not for servers

[nnull]

I've done this update for a small little server, it seems to run ok. I've noticed some little oddities, but nothing so significant that it's stopping the server from running. Although, I am concerned of something breaking.

Re:stability where? not for servers

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I'm all for bashing systemd when that's warranted. But you can't hold systemd responsible if Ubuntu screwed up their own upgrade process.

Re:stability where? not for servers

[thegarbz]

It's just a wrapper to the correct systemd command.

Are you saying that it's just a user error for not learning the correct commands for the correct software on the machine, or does "systemctl start foo" also not work?The latter is broken, the former is good. They should remove the compatibility layer altogether and if users demand a now non-standard way of doing something then let them link it in their own time, especially since there's a functional equivalent.

Incidentally it wasn't systemd that broke this behaviour, but rather the fact that the sudden jump causes you to miss an entire intermediate init system called upstart, which changed most of those scripts.

Re:stability where? not for servers

[c]

All I needed to restore my system init behaviour to something useful on 16.04 was:

apt-get install upstart-sysv

I'll consider revisiting systemd at some point in the future if Ubuntu is willing to migrate my init configurations properly, and I'm assuming that this approach will become untenable as systemd's tendrils creep deeper into the system, but for now it gets me back to a seemingly functional system.

Mint ftw

[Anonymous Coward]

The only good thing about Ubuntu is that it makes Mint with Cinnamon possible.

Re:Ubuntu Is Dying A Slow Death

[somenickname]

I dunno if that's true these days. Unity definitely caters to a specific workflow but, that workflow is not new and has been around a lot longer than Unity or Ubuntu (It's actually reminiscent of NextStep). When Unity was first released, it was admittedly unusable garbage. These days it just has some minor quirks. There is also a Unity Tweak Tool that can help you fiddle with things until it feels more natural. It's not without faults, to be sure. But, it's gotten back to the point where I could recommend it to people. After many years of boycotting vanilla Ubuntu, I've switched back to it and have no complaints at all.

Re: systemd - no thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

*BSD - yes please

Re:Ubuntu Is Dying A Slow Death

[nnull]

Or just run Kubuntu or Xubuntu, no Unity. Yes, it was an ugly mess when it was released, but I have to agree with you, it's not so bad anymore.

Re:Ubuntu Is Dying A Slow Death

[nnull]

I think Cinnamon is just going to replace KDE and Gnome overall on any system if they keep going the direction they're going.

MAAS

[stupidcomputers]

Did they fix MAAS yet? Ubuntu MAAS has been broken since the attempted 2.0 release on 16.04. Still in RC. What the heck happened here?

Re:MAAS

[Fruit]

Second google hit for "ubuntu maas" (for me) was http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/maas. But yeah, it would have been nice if the link was included in the original question.

Re:Ubuntu Is Dying A Slow Death

[jopsen]

My problem with unity is the papercuts... Opening dash and sometimes I can't get a terminal by typing t + enter, other times it works... Small things like that.. Oh, and animations and stuff that flickers... Even with intel graphics and latest ubuntu it still felt sketchy and crash occasionally.

Gnome shell isn't much better, but a little... as long as get nautilus as patch by ubuntu, can't live without decent type-ahead... I tried, and I'll never be able to move away...

Zany Zebra

[irrational_design]

Any clue what the naming convention will be after Zany Zebra?

Re:Zany Zebra

[Bongo]

Aardvark

Re:Zany Zebra

[Hognoxious]

Who knows, maybe they'll grow the fuck up and start giving them sensible names.

Re:Zany Zebra

[jd2112]

[#(%@! [$(@! obviously, followed by \)@#$ \$&^ and ]^#$^ ]~#(.

Re:Zany Zebra

[Antique Geekmeister]

I wonder if they'll start using Unicode, or emojis? It was sufficiently problematic when Fedora released "Shrodinger's Cat", with the single quote and an embedded umlaut.

Re:Zany Zebra

[fph il quozientatore]

You haven't seen weird until you read through the Linux kernel codenames...

Re:Zany Zebra

[Blaskowicz]

I can't wait for Ubuntu %C3%86kety %C3%86rfugl.

Re: Linux is still broken

[sce7mjm]

I don't think your use cases are the same as most other consistent linux users, therefore you should have been modded irrelevant.

Re:Do what I did...

[ArchieBunker]

Devuan is the dumbest fucking name I could ever think of. I really do like FreeBSD.

Happy with Ubuntu

[Urkki]

I for one am rather happy with Ubuntu. Can't stand Unity of course, and KDE has never been my cup of tea (have given it a few tries, given up every time, it just didn't do what I wanted). I was really happy when we got Ubuntu Mate, that just does what I want, and gets out of the way.

But with Ubuntu 16.10 I'm really looking forward to try Lubuntu again. The old LXDE is a bit too... lacking in small convenience features. I hope LXQt will improve on that (plus, I'm a Qt fan in general). If it's a let-down (beta 1 still has LXDE, I believe, so not trying it out yet), I suppose Ubuntu Mate will continue to give me the naughties UX.

I will use it when you...

[wbr1]

Take out the papers (Unity desktop) and the trash (systemd).

Re:Ubuntu Is Dying A Slow Death

[Blaskowicz]

I would use KDE if I were somehow stuck with it, like with XP or 7 where you're stuck with the desktop and make do with it.
KDE 5.6 looks weirder than it does in screenshots. It's still an animation and fade out fest that makes me throw up, and now it's configured for high res screens out of the box so that it makes your lowish res screen looks like 640x480.
With the weird start menu that is... too big and animated, it feels like a lot of work, that would have to be repeated each time I set it up somewhere.

Re:Ubuntu Is Dying A Slow Death

[blackpaw]

Yeah, we've switched to 16.04/Unity at work - usable, stays out of the way.

One of the few DE's that works well with multiple monitors - vertical launcher/task bars that lets you lock apps to the bar. Perfect for widescreen monitors, vertical realestate is valuable. Mate/LXDE/XFCE are all lacking there. KDE works well but ridiculously flacky eye candy.

Re: Ubuntu Is Dying A Slow Death

[blackpaw]

Whats "SuSefied" about KDE? Not even sure what that means :)