Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now officially open for development.
Canonical’s Matthias Klose shared the news on the Ubuntu development mailing list.
The first few weeks of every Ubuntu development cycle is spent syncing key packages from upstream sources, plumbing in the base infrastructure on which future changes lay, and so on.
As such you won’t see much in the way of change just yet. Once the foundations are in place, the fun stuff soon follows.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
Ubuntu 18.04 will be released on April 26, 2018 (see the full Ubuntu 18.04 release schedule for more details). As a Long Term Support (LTS) release Canonical will provide users with select app updates, security patches and bug fixes from release until 2023.
With the core tenet of a Long Term Support release to be reliable and stable the Bionic development cycle is probably going to be less dramatic than the Artful one preceding it.
Even so, there could be some minor new features introduced along the way. Based on teases shared by Ubuntu thus far will be Snap apps by default, visual improvements, and lots of fine tuning and polish for the new Ubuntu GNOME session.
The Ubuntu development team also say they want to launch a ‘theme contest’ to try and discover a new GTK theme for Ubuntu.
(On that point, with few (if any) designers left working on the desktop product at Canonical, is sourcing a new theme for the look and feel of your flagship LTS desktop product really wise? Using an established theme that has been improved and tested over many months would, IMO, be a better idea).
Ubuntu 18.04 daily builds will likely pop out in a few days. We’ll be sure to keep you posted.