Mark Shuttleworth has codenamed the next version of Ubuntu, 17.04, “Zesty Zapus”. In his blog post announcing the new name he offered his thought process behind the name:

We are a tiny band in a market of giants, but our focus on delivering free software freely together with enterprise support, services and solutions appears to be opening doors, and minds, everywhere. So, in honour of the valiantly tiny leaping long-tailed over the obstacles of life, our next release which will be Ubuntu 17.04, is hereby code named the ‘Zesty Zapus’.

Currently, there are not a lot of details as to what to expect in this upcoming release, but our guess is that we will see Snaps (Snappy Apps) take a more prominent position in Ubuntu. This may also be the last release to feature Unity 7 as the default (vs the new Unity 8 convergent desktop).

We will know more about what is to come in the new release as the development schedule and feature set begins to take form and becomes official. If you want to play with 16.10, the release that came out this month, you can follow our upgrade instructions if you are already running Ubuntu, or you can order one of our systems with the newest version pre-installed!