The upcoming Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating system is currently in development, with a second Alpha build seeded to public testers at the end of July 2016.

However, the Ubuntu Kernel Team hasn't yet managed to switch the distribution's kernel packages to a recent stable or development version, as Ubuntu 16.10 remains powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel packages that are being used in the stable Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.

The other day, they published a new installation of their weekly newsletter to inform the community and those willing to run Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak)on their personal computers about the fact that the distro has received the latest stable patches from the upstream Linux 4.6.5 kernel in the master-next tree.

Also, it looks like the unstable kernel branch for Ubuntu 16.10 was rebased on the latest stable and most advanced Linux kernel series, Linux 4.7. "Our Yakkety kernel master-next tree has applied the latest 4.6.5 stable patches. We are preparing to get this uploaded to the Yakkety archive. Our unstable branch has been rebased to 4.7," explained the devs.

The good news is that the final release of the Ubuntu 16.10 operating system, which should hit the street later this year on October 13, will be powered by a kernel from the upcoming Linux 4.8 series, whose development cycle is about to begin with a first Release Candidate (RC) build seeded to public testers this coming weekend.

Until then, Ubuntu 16.10 will soon get various packages from the GNOME 3.20 Stack, including the long-anticipated Nautilus 3.20 file manager and GTK+ 3.20 framework for modern desktop applications. The next milestone in the Yakkety Yak development cycle is the Beta 1 release, which should be out later this month on the 25th.