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Effective immediately, the new release of Ubuntu, 17.10, aka 'Artful Aardvark' has been released!
This release will be supported for 9 months (until 2018) for Long Term Support, stick with release 16.04, instead.
Official flavors (e.g. Kubuntu) are also released.
See the above release notes for a full list of changes and where you can get a copy.
[Full disclosure: the majority of SoylentNews' servers run Ubuntu 16.04 LTS though we have taken steps towards moving to Gentoo.]
Also:
The customized version of GNOME that Ubuntu 17.10 uses is very much in the mould of the (now defunct) Unity desktop, so it won't be to everyone's tastes.
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If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 23 2017, @01:26PM
I think you're grossly overstating the difficulty of writing cross-platform software that runs on Linux. Considering the fact that a loosely affiliated group of volunteers has tens of thousands of working software packages that build from source on Linux, and most of the fucking internet runs off it, I would say supporting it isn't especially difficult.
The real problem is simply legacy code. If some company made the completely reasonable decision to use Visual Studio 6 or similar to start writing their colossal piece of software on Windows, and fifteen years later it's a colossal Frankenstein of unbelievably complicated code, then there is simply no business case to port it. Most companies still use Microsoft Windows on the desktop. No sane Chief Financial Officer is going to greenlight a project to do a clean rewrite in cross-platform tools when the Return On Investment (in the form of new customers who will run the new application from Linux) is negative. And to be clear, I'm not criticizing companies, Microsoft, or Visual Studio for having huge and complicated legacy apps. If they had started out writing the software for OS/2, OS 9, OS X, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 1 the codebase would be every bit as enormous and complex today and a clean cross-platform rewrite would be every bit as impractical and financially unsound.
Your industry is stuck on Windows for legacy reasons. It's not good or bad, it just is. The best I can do as an FSF member is support the development of fully free software alternatives to the software you're using. But it's awfully difficult for the free software community to put together something that is probably quite literally almost an order of magnitude more complicated than the Chromium project.