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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."
What's the next naming scheme?
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
No: if you understand the risks then you won't run anything mission critical on it, but it won't make it less prone to break. Breakage is unlikely to come because you stress it, more by exposure to some unusual edge case.
I suppose: if you do really understand it you might be in a better position to repair it and dig yourself out of a hole.
I used to alpha and beta test Ubuntu releases. It can be fun, especially if you have a spare computer with nothing critical on it. I did help find some issues back in the day, that got fixed before release. It felt good. If you have any skills, it can be a cool experience to try.
Ubuntu is the best distribution for all use cases and user knowledge levels. The addition of systemd really kicked things up even another notch.
You may begin...
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:
Not once has my Ubuntu installation ever displayed the animal nickname. In fact, I'm running 16.04 and I don't even know what the nickname for it is.
Also, MacOS uses animal nicknames more prominently and confusingly and both MacOS and Windows have confusing version numbering (OS X makes it look like there's only been minor revisions for decades, and Windows has no clue how to count and changes the whole scheme repeatedly).
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I once worked at a small company that had "conference room A" and "conference room 2", so everyone called them "Little Joe" and "Big Hoss" to avoid confusion.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.