Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) Alpha 2 Hits the Streets for Opt-In Flavors

Ubuntu itself only participates on the Final Beta release, which is expected to land this fall on September 28, along with the rest of the official Ubuntu flavors, hopefully shipping with the latest GNOME 3.26 desktop environment and the Linux 4.13 kernel, which still didn’t land in the Ubuntu 17.10 repositories. Ubuntu 17.10 Alpha 2 is still based on the Linux 4.11 kernel that’s used in the current stable release, Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), but there are a lot of internal updates, such as Python 3 support as default, GNOME’s GDM (GNOME Display Manager) as default login manager instead of LightDM, and hardware-accelerated video playback.