Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) Final Beta Ready for Download, Here’s What’s New

First and foremost, Ubuntu 17.10 is shipping with a refreshed desktop environment, powered by the latest GNOME 3.26 release, highly customized by Canonical to resemble the look and feel of its deprecated Unity user interface. This is also the first release of Ubuntu to ship without Unity in more than six years. On top of that, Wayland is now used as default display server instead of X11, but you can still use X.Org Server if you choose the “Ubuntu on Xorg” option from the login screen, which is now powered by GNOME’s GDM (GNOME Display Manager) instead of LightDM. Under the hood, Ubuntu 17.10 Final Beta is powered by Linux kernel 4.13.