The next round – A small look into the future

With elementary’s Launchpad site being updated constantly, we can already get a small preview on plans for the next big release, which will be called Loki, obviously. It’s much too early to speak about what it will exactly look like or feature, but there are already some facts and plans.

elementary OS 0.4 “Loki” will be based on Ubuntu 16.04, which will be the next Long Term Support (LTS) release and get updates till 2021. Wayland support is also planned, which will be the greatest and most important milestone for nearly every distribution in the next few years and also an advantage for the HiDPI mode for many displays with much higher resolutions. Another step forward in elementary OS 0.4 will be an AppCenter, which will feature applications for elementary in one centralized place. This will likely be the most important thing for the user in the future, as it is still often complicated to find the best looking and working applications for elementary OS and Pantheon. A new possibility to connect with elementary services is also planned. With the upcoming elementary Account, it will be possible to connect to other users (also with a new integrated IM client), to buy apps in the AppCenter or probably to sync system settings. But all these things would need much time for the realization and huge upgrades to elementary’s infrastructure and depend on the success of elementary OS Freya.

Most likely, when the development speed of elementary OS stays constant, we’ll be able to see a preview release at the end of 2016 and the final sometimes in 2017. Exact release dates aren’t possible, because of the project’s philosophy and the instability of the plans, so all informations are very vague and can change rapidly. On Launchpad, you can find all proposed changes and plans for loki-beta1.

More elementary support

The elementary project announced to extend possibilities for support with a new StackExchange page for relevant questions and discussions. At this time, the site is still a proposal trying to get enough activity for being accepted on the full StackExchange and it is obviously on a good way. On the new support page on the beta website, you can find all communities and ways to get or to give support. In my opinion it is important to have different ways available, as elementary OS gets new users every day and different communities also develop different focuses. To get an overview about these, a page like the new one on the upcoming main website is very helpful.

The tip of the week will be back next week