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Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver' Beta 2 Now Available (betanews.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Ubuntu Linux 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" is almost here -- it is due on April 26. In the interim, today, the second -- and final -- beta becomes available. Bionic Beaver is very significant, as it is an LTS version, meaning "Long Term Support." This is important to those that prefer stability to bleeding edge and don't want to deal with the hassle of upgrades. In other words, you can install 18.04 and be confident that it will be supported for 5 years. In comparison, non-LTS Ubuntu versions get a mere 9 months.

There is plenty to be excited about with Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver' Beta 2, including the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment -- Beta 1 did not include GNOME at all. Of course, all the other DE flavors are available too, such as KDE and Xfce. The kernel is at 4.15, which while not the most current version, is still quite modern. Also included is LibreOffice 6.0 -- an essential tool that rivals Microsoft Office. Wayland is available as a technical preview, although X remains the default display server -- for now.

3 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Beta LTS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Jesus, are you a fucking idiot or something???

  2. Re:Nostalgia by Thelasko · · Score: 3, Insightful

    7.04 was peak Ubuntu.

    I'll have to disagree with you there. I started with Ubuntu version 7.04. There were a lot of bugs. Flash was a pain to get working, display drivers were a mess. I must have run the command "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" a dozen times to get it to work.

    10.04 was the best. Everything worked. Everything was in a logical place, with exception of the window controls, which you get used to. If you couldn't deal with the window controls, 8.04 wasn't bad either.

    --
    One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
  3. Thanks Ubuntu! by Xenolith0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've said before in previous posts that I personally use Fedora, since my day job revolves around Red Hat based systems. But I LOVE Ubuntu. When I starting using Linux back in 1997 (I was late to the game), the community was toxic.

    The choices were basically Slackware, which, while a good distro the SW community really expected you to be a Unix god and was unwilling to provides helpful answers other than "gtfo n00b" and "go use windows".

    The other choice was Mandriva which had a better community but just the worst documentation. Which meant, you'd go to the community to ask for help, you'd get a response of "RTFM", which would have been fine, had there been a manual and/or if it had had correct information in it. (Yes, I know there were other distros at the time but those were the two big communities)

    So a lot of my time was spent reading/editing source code to learn how to use application which should have "just worked" in the first damn place. Now to be fair, I learned a ton because of that.

    Then came Ubuntu, along with its rich sugar-daddy. In came professional tech-writers documenting the system, documenting the applications, writing correct and updated how-to guides. In came professional coders fixing long standing bugs. And I watched many other distros die as they bled users to Ubuntu. Even if you dislike some of the design decisions Ubuntu has made over the years, they greatly increased the quality of the entire Linux ecosystem.

    Thank you Ubuntu devs for raising the bar!