14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Adam Conrad has announced that the forthcoming Final Beta release of the Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system is now in freeze until its launch late on March 23, 2017.
Ubuntu 17.04 has been in development since October last year, during which it received one Alpha and one Beta milestone, but only for the opt-in flavors. Ubuntu itself will participate only in the upcoming Final Beta release, which is expected to land tomorrow if everything goes according to plan.
However, the developer informs the Ubuntu community that the queue freeze will last from March 21 until the final release of Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) on April 13, 2017, which means that no major package updates will land in the repositories, exception making those that are approved by a member of the release team.
"As with the previous releases, we have a bot in place that will accept uploads that are unseeded and don't affect images," said Adam Conrad. "Don't take this as an open invitation to break Feature Freeze on those components, this is just to reduce the burden on the release team, so we only review the uploads that need very serious consideration."
As mentioned before, Ubuntu 17.04 Final Beta is arriving late on Thursday, March 23, and you are urged to download the Live ISO images, install them on a spare computer or partition designed for testing purposes only, and report any bugs or issues you might encounter. The rest of the official Ubuntu flavors will also participate in tomorrow's Final Beta release.