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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.
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.
It's a way to proof your bad idea with Unity!
I'm not sure if that was a typo or really clever. But "proof" noun: a test or trial of something.
Which is exactly what it was. It was a test to eliminate what was at the time an incredibly fucked up Gnome interface. Providing an alternative to that abortion was exactly the opposite of a bad idea. The fact that the Gnome guys came to their senses, and that upstream at that point has something that works makes dropping the project quite the humble move.
Canonical have done this a few times already: e.g. upstart, and mir (although while dropping mir work in the face of Wayland I think this one was resource constricted given that Wayland is not prime time ready and the result was to drop back to X11).
They lost their leading in usuability
Debatable. Typically when I see someone on Slashdot complain that something is unusable it typically means: someone moved my cheese and therefor it must be worse. Usable is in the eye of the beholder, and if the beholder is beholding an OS running on a tablet than Unity was pretty much the *only* usable interface.