As a big fan of the GNOME desktop environment, I have long been a Fedora user. After all, that operating system uses GNOME as its primary environment. Since Canonical killed Unity and moved its focus to GNOME, I have a renewed interest in Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distributions, such as System76’s wonderful Pop!_OS. I suspect I am not alone in my feelings.
Today, Ubuntu Linux 18.04 ‘Bionic Beaver’ Beta 1 becomes available for download. Ubuntu 18.04 is significant, as it will be an LTS (Long Term Support) version. As was the case when Unity was the primary DE, GNOME is not available in this beta stage. Instead, there are other flavors from which to choose, such as Kubuntu with KDE Plasma and Xubuntu, which uses Xfce.
I am glad to see it will be LTS.