Canonical released today, as expected, the Final Beta of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system, due for release on April 13, 2017, along with the rest of the opt-in flavors, such as Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, etc.

The Final Beta is the last step in the development cycle of the Zesty Zapus (Ubuntu 17.04) release, and it kind of shows us what to expect from the upcoming operating system. The Final Beta Freeze stage took effect on Monday, March 20, and will last until the final release, which means that what you see now is what you'll get on April 13.

As you might know already, Ubuntu 17.04 is powered by the latest Linux 4.10 kernel, version 4.10.5 appears to be in Canonical's kernel-ppa, and the final release will also be using this kernel. Linux 4.10 is a major update over the Linux 4.8 kernel series used in Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), the current stable version at the moment of writing.

What this means is that most of the open-source graphics drivers included with the Linux 4.10 kernel series have been improved, so chances are you'll get a boost in gaming performance, not to mention that Ubuntu 17.04 is shipping with the newest Mesa 17.0 3D Graphics Library (Mesa 17.0.1 is available in the Final Beta).

Driverless printing, systemd-resolved is default DNS resolver

Unfortunately, Ubuntu 17.04 Final Beta is still using the old X.Org Server 1.18.4 display server, but we keep our fingers crossed for the Ubuntu devs working on the graphics stack to finish the migration/testing of the new X.Org Server 1.19 series, which Canonical's Timo Aaltonen planned to include a few weeks ago.

Another interesting change that some of you knew about for a while now is that a swap file will now be used instead of a swap partition when installing Ubuntu 17.04. Of course, this does not apply to users who upgrade from Ubuntu 16.10. On the networking side of things, it looks like the default DNS resolver is now systemd-resolved.

Those who still have a printer and use it will be glad to know that Ubuntu 17.04 Final Beta is driverless printing friendly, meaning that it supports Apple AirPrint and IPP Everywhere printers out of the box. Among some updated apps, the release comes with LibreOffice 5.3, QEMU 2.8, libvirt 2.5, DPDK 16.11.1, and OpenVPN 2.4.

Of course, numerous of your favorite applications have been updated to their latest versions and are available for installation from the stable repositories, including MPV, GIMP, VirtualBox, Thunderbird, Firefox, Synaptic, etc. For the first time in many years, the GNOME Stack is the newest release, in this case GNOME 3.24.

However, not all the included apps from the GNOME Stack were updated to version 3.24, as Ubuntu 17.04 Final Beta is shipping with the Nautilus (Files) 3.20.4 file manager, GNOME Terminal 3.20.2 terminal emulator, Evolution 3.22.6 groupware client, File Roller 3.22.3 file archiver, and GNOME Software (a.k.a. Ubuntu Software) 3.22.7 package manager.

Among other changes included in Ubuntu 17.04 Final Beta, we can mention that gconf is no longer installed by default as it has been replaced by gsettings. If you want to test this pre-release version, you can download the 64-bit or 32-bit Live ISO images of Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) Final Beta right now from our website.