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Ubuntu Linux 17.04 'Zesty Zapus' Final Beta Now Available For Download (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli writes: The final beta of Ubuntu 17.04 'Zesty Zapus' became available for download Thursday. While it is never a good idea to run pre-release software on production machines, Canonical is claiming that it should be largely bug free at this point. In other words, if you understand the risks, it should be a fairly safe. Home users aside, this is a good opportunity for administrators to conduct testing prior to the official release next month.
"The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of the Ubuntu 17.04 Desktop, Server, and Cloud products. Codenamed 'Zesty Zapus', 17.04 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution," says Adam Conrad, Canonical. "The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs."
"The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of the Ubuntu 17.04 Desktop, Server, and Cloud products. Codenamed 'Zesty Zapus', 17.04 continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution," says Adam Conrad, Canonical. "The team has been hard at work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs."
I've been running Zesty for over a month in VMs and on bare metal with no serious issues. I had one bug that threw an error message on startup several weeks ago, but it was patched within a few days... and the bug didn't seem to affect anything. I don't use the default DE, though -- I use Cinnamon, so ymmv with Unity.
My only issues with Zesty are the same as I have with previous releases. Running IPv6 as dual stack with IPv4 is more complicated than it should be... the Gnome network manager doesn't understand IPv6 DNS addresses so it displays part of them as an IPv4 address instead, and samba occasionally flakes out and doesn't see my windows shares, yet will map to them if I run a script to do so (I don't know what's going on there... master browser issue perhaps, but... doubt it!)
I really can't see much of a change from 16.04 LTS or 16.10, but it runs well, and I have no serious complaints. I've upgraded from 16.04 to 16.10 to 17.04 beta without anything breaking, but If your 16.04 works for your hardware and has repos for your software, you may want to stick with it 'til the next LTS. There's no significant changes in this one to convince me it's a must-have. Maybe the next LTS release if it has more Mir or Wayland support and Vulkan drivers.
Why would that be so hard to understand?
The Ubuntu release schedule is and have always been: