14 DAY TRIAL // One of our readers was asking us last week if we had any news on when Ubuntu Touch would switch to a newer version of Ubuntu. The official answer came a few days ago, from Canonical's Łukasz Zemczak, who revealed that the Ubuntu mobile OS would soon be rebased on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).
It appears that this is not the first time the Ubuntu Touch developers have been asked by Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu Tablet users about the state of operating system's baseline, which is currently still using the packages from the now-deprecated Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) release.
"There is no real touch development work happening on yakkety - more also because our touch images are still using upstart," says Łukasz Zemczak. "There are no plans for us switching to yakkety so we any yakkety-based images are most likely to be broken. We recommend using our vivid (stable, rc, rc-proposed) channels for any touch-related development for now."
So there you have it, Ubuntu Touch will soon be based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), which is the latest and most advanced, as well as long-term supported Ubuntu release. When will that happen? We don't know yet, but we have a feeling that it might be before the year's end. Until then, the Ubuntu Touch team is preparing a new update, OTA-13, which should land on September 7, 2016.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 is currently in feature freeze, but it promises lots of new features and improvements, as well as fixes for some of the most annoying issues reported by users since OTA-12, which is currently the most stable software version for all supported Ubuntu Phone and Tablet devices.