One small (well not really small) note - Our beta 1 ISO is about to become available, and we could REALLY use your help in testing things out. We have attempted to make the testing process more approachable to new people by creating a guide located at https://ubuntubudgie.org/testing. Please have a read through if you are interested in being a rockstar! The testing will assist us in ensuring a quality product ships out the door when 18.04 hits GA.

Hi everyone, We would like to announce that starting with the release of 18.04 LTS; our community support will be moving to Discourse. Currently, most of our support activities are spread across several social media platforms - Facebook, G+, Twitter, Reddit, IRC and our Gitter community room. What this means for you is that we will move most of our support to the forum. One of the reasons for moving to Discourse is making content more accessible and easier to find. Case and point, if you have a problem you would usually ask the question in our chatroom and wait for someone from our team or community to answer. However, due to the nature of the instant messaging platform, the answer is lost, and any new user-facing the same problem needs to ask the question again. With Discourse any question is easily searchable due to its static nature. It will help us to foster the community even further making it even more significant, especially with the upcoming release that will attract a lot of new users. You can use your social accounts for easier registration or go for the proper old manual account registration. Among new feature is also the feature to receive a digest of essential threads to your email as well the notification when you get a response to your thread or post. We will monitor the Gitter chat room for next three months and redirect new users to discourse. There will be a message explaining the transition when you join Gitter channel for any new or existing user in the meantime so that we can be sure everyone can move to Discourse. The intent, however, is that if we cannot answer the question immediately - we suggest moving the item into the forum directly. Overall this move will allow us to have a better communication hub similarly to AskUbuntu or UbuntuForums which will make it easier to answer any questions related to Ubuntu Budgie, gather further feedback and make it an enjoyable experience for everyone. Our discourse forum is not a replacement for AskUbuntu and UbuntuForums - these are naturally the critical support platforms for all things Ubuntu. Discourse is an added extra with a focus on all things Ubuntu Budgie (and not general Ubuntu issues). For more information feel free to ask us in the comments to this post or via Gitter. You can visit the forum at the following URL https://discourse.ubuntubudgie.org