The first beta variants for Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak are here and can now be downloaded from Canonical servers. Want to know more about it?
Ubuntu 16.10 And Opt-In Flavors
The development process has reached beta stages, but only for the opt-in flavors. Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu MATE, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu Kylin took are the flavors taking part in the Beta 1 milestone. Xbuntu decided to skip this first Beta release.
Ironically, Ubuntu itself doesn’t take part in the Beta 1 milestone, only the Final Beta.
Software packages have been updated to their latest version in these flavors. GNOME 3.20 Stack, LibreOffice 5.2, and GCC 6.2.0 compiler are part of this list. As far as the kernel is concerned, Ubuntu 16.10 still uses Linux 4.4 LTS kernel. But, come to the final release of Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak, Linux kernel 4.8 will be used.
As far as the Final Beta release of Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) is concerned, it shall be out on September 22 i.e. one month away. And the final release is scheduled for October 13, 2016.
The links to ISO files for Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu MATE and Lubuntu are live on canonical servers. Early testers can download the beta distros from there.