Canonical's Steve Langasek recently unveiled the first edition of the Ubuntu Foundations Team weekly newsletter with some pretty cool details about the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.
The first Alpha versions of Ubuntu 17.10 are just around the corner, since its launch is scheduled for June 29, 2017, so Ubuntu developers are working hard to add new features to the platform, such as the Support for Position Independent Executables (PIE) enabled by default for increased security, as well as other enhancements in many areas of concern, including Safe Boot.
Support for PIE is great news for Ubuntu Linux users, as all binaries with PIE will now be loaded automatically at random locations within virtual memory, along with all its dependencies, each time those applications are run. This makes Return Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks more difficult to execute.
Netplan is coming to Ubuntu Cloud 17.10
Among other notable improvements for Ubuntu 17.10 we can mention the Netplan implementation, the Canonical YAML network configuration in the Ubuntu Cloud images. Also, Netplan will be used by default to configure networks when installing Ubuntu Server through the Debian installer.
Besides, those who want to boot Ubuntu together with Windows, the developers have improved support so that users can boot Windows seamlessly from the grub bootloader. Some patches were also added so that the platform no longer prompts users to disable secure boot when using DKMS modules.
Lastly, it appears that Ubuntu 17.10 will have support for the Python 3.6 series, whose transition to the new version has already begun.
Among other things, the team responsible for the kernel for Ubuntu also recently announced that they will be trying to add to the Linux 4.13 as Ubuntu 17.10's default kernel, scheduled to release next October 19, 2017.