The second Beta build of the upcoming Black GNOME Linux 16.04 operating system has been released earlier today, March 30, 2016, bringing a significant amount of new features and improvements.

Black GNOME Linux 16.04 Beta 2 highlights includes numerous software updates for the GNOME Stack, such as GNOME Shell 3.18, as well as most of the packages from the stable GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, because, after all, the distribution is based on the upstream Ubuntu GNOME 16.04 LTS Beta 2 operating system.

Continuing with the changes implemented in the second Beta build of Black GNOME Linux 16.04, we can notice that the Ubuntu Software Center package manager has been replaced with GNOME Software, the GNOME Logs and GNOME Calendar apps are now installed by default, and GNOME Buider was added to the repositories.

Additionally, the Sharing panel from the GNOME Control Center app has been fixed, along with the installation of language packs and the iBus support. The experimental Wayland session is present as well, but to enable it, you need to install the gnome-session-wayland pacakge and then select "GNOME on Wayland" from the login screen.

Just like upstream, please try to keep in mind that the Wayland session only works with open-source graphics drivers. Also like upstream, the Black GNOME Linux 16.04 Beta 2 release has been rebased on the Linux 4.4.6 LTS kernel, which offers better support for Intel Skylake processors.

3D support in the virtual graphics driver, a new driver for the Corsair Vengeance K90 mechanical keyboard, support for TPM 2.0 chips, journaled RAID 5 support, and the usual memory management, power efficiency, and filesystems improvements are also part of the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel.

Black GNOME Linux 16.04 Beta 2 is available for download right now via our website, only for 64-bit computers. You can test it, but please be aware of the fact that it's still a pre-release version, which means that some bugs might be present. Do not install this version on production systems.