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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.

14 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. "Bionic Beaver" by Type44Q · · Score: 4, Funny

    Is it just me or does "Bionic Beaver" sound awfully similar to "Cybernetic Vagina?"

    1. Re:"Bionic Beaver" by freeze128 · · Score: 2

      Why is it *IN THE SINK*?

    2. Re:"Bionic Beaver" by DeBaas · · Score: 4, Funny

      Is it just me or does "Bionic Beaver" sound awfully similar to "Cybernetic Vagina?"

      and you couldn't come up with a synonym which starts with a C, now could you?

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    3. Re:"Bionic Beaver" by datavirtue · · Score: 2

      This is the only version name I ever will remember besides "Ice Cream Sandwich."

      --
      I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
    4. Re:"Bionic Beaver" by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 2

      Is it just me or does "Bionic Beaver" sound awfully similar to "Cybernetic Vagina?"

      The in-house / development version name is "Jaime Sommers".

      --
      It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  2. Re:Beta LTS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

  3. Re:Beta LTS? by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

    How is the Beta going to be Long Term Support? It is a contradiction in terms.
    I know 18.04 once released it will be flagged as a Long Term Support product. But being that it currently beta. This particular version isn't expected to be supported.

    18.04 LTS is undergoing beta testing - in case anything is seriously bad before it's finally released. It's not the beta itself that is LTS, it's the final product. You're beta testing what will be 18.04 LTS.

    Though, it seems kind of late, I mean, it's April already and they're not at release candidates? Might as well call it 18.05LTS or 18.06LTS...

  4. So excited by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 2

    There is plenty to be excited about ... including the GNOME 3.28 desktop environment.

    'Cause I use Mate, not that GNOME 3 <expletive deleted />

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    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
  5. 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".
  6. Re:Ubuntu Mate ?!? by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Nostalgia by AvitarX · · Score: 2

    Maybe.

    I started Ubuntu with 7.04 (maybe that was the one I liked most even, I forget). I loved the 2 panel gnome 2, and it seemed to work great. Compiz worked well, and everything seemed good for me (flash and nvidia drivers).

    With 8.04 a hard-drive scheduling issue made it unusable, and I pretty much stopped using Linux as a desktop. I can fully imagine it got better, but I don't think I'll find a desktop I like more than gnome 2 of that era with compiz as a window manager. Also, it was a pretty exciting time to use Linux as highly customizable 3d desktops became a thing, the web was comfortably cross platform again, Open Office was a pretty good suite for free, and I was young, so everything was more exciting...

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    Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
  8. 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!

  9. Re:Don't look at me... by apoc.famine · · Score: 2

    They're only on "B" right now. If you'd suggested "Buggering Baboon" you might have had a shot. Be patient - M will come around again.

    --
    Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
  10. Re:Slashdot Alternatives? by Teun · · Score: 2

    Usenet, comp.misc

    --
    "The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."