Canonical finally announced the release of Ubuntu 17.04. Codenamed “Zesty Zapus”. In general, there doesn’t exist any new features or important updates. Just newer packages with bugs fixed and problems addressed from previous releases.

So, What Was Changed In Ubuntu 17.04?

Ubuntu 17.04 5

PowerPC architecture support is no longer available in Ubuntu 17.04. Instead of using a swap partition by default and asking for it in the installation, a swap file will be created and used from now on (which means it will only be created as a file under something like /swap, instead of a standalone partition). Ubuntu 17.04 comes with kernel 4.10.

It also comes with GTK+ 3.20 and the other GNOME applications (3.24, without nautilus and terminal which are still 3.20). LibreOffice was updated to version 5.3. gconf is no longer installed by default.

Unity 8 (Mir) is available as an optional session in Ubuntu 17.04. However, and according to our experience, it’s not usable at all. Nothing opens and you can’t spend more than 5 minutes in it:

Unity 8 and Mir under Ubuntu 17.04
Unity 8 and Mir under Ubuntu 17.04, yea, we couldn’t take a screenshot so we Googled for it.

However, it’s fair to say that the new release is more “stable”. Comparing it to the 16.04 LTS, no crashes or weired bugs faced us so far (we’ve been using it for a month since beta). And that’s a nice thing to have in your Linux distribution. As the company announced, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will detach Unity for GNOME.

Download Ubuntu 17.04

Users who are happy with their current Linux distribution probably shouldn’t bother to upgrade. However, if you are using Ubuntu 16.10, you should consider upgrading to 17.04 in order to continue receiving updates and security fixes (Ubuntu 16.10 support will end in around 3 months).

[btn btnlink=”http://releases.ubuntu.com/17.04/release/” btnsize=”medium” bgcolor=”#dd9933″ txtcolor=”#ffffff” btnnewt=”1″ nofollow=”1″ btnicon=”fa fa-cloud”]Download Ubuntu 17.04[/btn]

Complete release notes are here.

Other Ubuntu 17.04 Flavors

Ubuntu 17.04 8

The other Ubuntu-based distributions are now available as well. Like Ubuntu MATE 17.04, Ubuntu GNOME 17.04, Xubuntu 17.04 and Kubuntu 17.04.. Some of them carry noticeable changes.

Ubuntu MATE now ships with MATE 1.18, which completely depends on GTK+ 3 instead of GTK+ 2. Many different bugs were fixed in MATE desktop as well. Lubuntu (and other Ubuntu flavors) now allows you to install LXQt interface form the official repositories. Kubuntu now comes with KDE 5.9. Ubuntu Budgie is the newest member in the family which comes by default with the Budge desktop interface.

You can check the release notes for each one of those falvors from their official websites: Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu GNOME, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Lubuntu.

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