Canonical's Matthias Klose announced on Tuesday that the upcoming Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) operating system is now officially open for development.

Now that Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth dubbed Ubuntu 18.10 as the "Cosmic Cuttlefish," it's time for the development cycle to kick off officially, and it looks like there's some under-the-hood change to start with, including the final GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 8.1.0 release, as well as the transition to ncurses.

It also looks like the Ubuntu development team plans to migrate to newer technologies for the Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) release. These include the GCC 8 as default system compiler, a change that should be implemented sometime next month or in July, OpenJDK 11 the default JRE/JDK, and Python 3.7 as default Python implementation.

"Cosmic Cuttlefish is now open for development, with the syncs from unstable done and built. The development version starts with only a few changes," said Matthias Klose. "Please be aware of the planned compiler changes (GCC update from 7 to 8) around June/July, an update to OpenJDK 11, and an update from Python 3.6 to 3.7."

The official release schedule is yet to be announced

While the development cycle of Ubuntu 18.10 was just kicked off, we're waiting for the release team to prepare a dedicated Ubuntu Wiki page with details on the complete release schedule, which is rumored to drop the Alpha and Beta 1 milestones for opt-in flavors, and the official release date for the Cosmic Cuttlefish, which should hit the streets sometime in October 2018.

Another major change that will happen during the development of Ubuntu 18.10 is that most of the official flavors, including Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Studio, and probably others will follow soon, are dropping support for 32-bit installations by shipping only with a 64-bit ISO image, something that Ubuntu already adopted for the past few releases.

As usual, we will continually monitor the development cycle of Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) to let you guys know what major or minor changes are happening in the background. Until then, if you want to become an early adopter, you can always download and install the most recent daily build of Ubuntu 18.10 from the official servers, but don't use for any production work.

Ubuntu 18.10

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