The second Alpha for Ubuntu 16.04 flavors is landing tomorrow, and it looks like most of the important names are missing, with a few exceptions.

The Ubuntu developers have been discussing for the past few days about this latest Alpha, and it took some convincing to get the thing rolling. The thing is that most of the distros chose not to participate in this Alpha release, and there is a good chance things are going to change in the next cycle.

Canonical dropped intermediary releases a couple of years ago for Ubuntu, and they only cover the final Beta version. They still offer daily builds for most of the six months interval between two releases, so naming something Alpha 2 is somewhat arbitrary. The only advantage for an Alpha is that developers freeze the process for a couple of days and make sure that the OS is booting and can be used.

Alpha 2 will be here

If we take a look at the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS schedule, we’ll notice that the new Alpha is going to be a day late. Delays don’t usually happen in the Ubuntu world, but it’s not a major milestone.

“16.04 is now up on the ISO tracker for the flavors that marked their participation. Dailies are halted and will not build until the final Alpha 2 images are available, which is targeted for Friday. Should you have any questions, comments, or concerns, you can contact the appropriate member of the Release Team,” developer Walter Lapchynski explained.

Only Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, and Ubuntu Cloud have confirmed their participation, but it’s likely that the first Beta in the series will be a little more successful. In any case, the development cycle for Ubuntu 16.10 will most likely have some changes to how these releases are actually made.