Five of Ubuntu’s siblings have taken part in the second alpha release of the Saucy Salamander development cycle.
Not every official Ubuntu family member takes part in every development release – most notably Ubuntu itself. Those choosing to take advantage of this 2nd bout of alpha-grade testing are:
- Kubuntu
- Lubuntu
- Xubuntu
- Ubuntu GNOME
- UbuntuKylin
Following on from Alpha 2 the next development milestone is Beta 1 and is scheduled for September 5th. The final stable releases of Ubuntu 13.10, along with most of its flavours, is pencilled in for October 17th.
Development Builds
Development builds of any Ubuntu release are not recommended for use as your main OS on your laptop, PC or souped-up-toaster. Why not? They contain bugs, are in various states of finish, and will have missing features and hardware support.
Tl;dr: these builds will burn your toast.
Kubuntu 13.10 Alpha 2
Notable additions in Kubuntu 13.10 Alpha 2 include KDE Plasma and Applications 4.11 RC1 – which brings with it speedier Nepomuk indexing- and the Muon Discover application for finding and installing applications.
Lubuntu 13.10 Alpha 2
Lubuntu fans will discover lots of changes under the hood of their favourite lightweight distro:
- Firefox replaces Chromium as the default browser
- XScreensaver has been removed
- ZRam has been added enabling the desktop installer to work on lower RAM machines
- Newer artwork beginning to arrive
Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 Alpha 2
Ubuntu GNOME Shell-toting sibling includes ‘most of GNOME 3.8‘. This includes the new GNOME Classic Session.
Ubuntu Online Accounts has been dropped from the install. GNOME Online Accounts (GOA) remains installed, whilst Ubuntu Online Accounts can be installed from the repositories.
The switch to GOA will pleased fans of Google’s two-factor authentication as, in this release, support for the security measure has been added.
Other Releases
Download links to Xubuntu & UbuntuKylin are presented below.