Ubuntu 17.10 Enters The Feature Freeze

Ubuntu 17.10, the Artful Aardvark, has crossed into the feature freeze this week.

Ubuntu developers are now to be focused on fixing bugs rather than on introducing new features for 17.10, which will be officially released at the middle of October.

There still though is the possibility of feature freeze exceptions to be granted as well as those packages currently residing in artful-proposed are still able to land. Confirmation of the Artful feature freeze was posted today to the mailing list.

Ubuntu 17.10 overall is a big release due to its transitioning away from Unity 7 to a modified GNOME Shell environment and other implications such as switching from the X.Org Server to Wayland and from LightDM to GDM, among other package switches. It's expected to be released with the Linux 4.13 kernel and Mesa 17.2 will also hopefully make it in there. The Mir 1.0 release has yet to be seen this cycle and might not make it into 17.10 now given the feature freeze.

Next up is the opt-in beta release for participating flavors on 31 August, the UI freeze on 14 September, the final beta release on 28 September, the kernel freeze on 5 October, and the anticipated official release on 19 October.