A new Alpha is supposed to make an appearance this week for Ubuntu flavors, but developers don't seem to have expressed an interest for it.

The regular Ubuntu distro no longer gets Alpha releases, and only a final Beta is provided towards the end of the development cycle. It's been this way for some time now, and people got used to it.

The other Ubuntu-based distros don't follow the same model and most of them chose to continue to release Alpha and Beta versions. Things are even a little bit more complicated now because this is the development cycle for the LTS branch, which means that we should also see distros like Mythbuntu or Ubuntu Studio also show up.

Developers would still want the Alpha 2 ISO

One of the Ubuntu developers, Steve Langasek, who's also the guy in charge for the second Alpha, said that no one has signed up to do any of the work needed for the ReleaseTaskSignup. He assumed people might not want to release them anymore.

"Is this alpha needed by any of the teams? The thought some time ago was that the continuous instability guarantees of proposed-migration would make specific alpha milestones unnecessary. The Ubuntu team have been making use of this now for several cycles to great effect. Are other flavors still finding these alphas necessary, or is the system of continuously-installable images working for you? Does someone wish to step forward to drive alpha 2?" Steve wrote.

From the looks of it, people are still interested in the Alpha 2 release in the Xenial Xerus branch, but they seem to have been defeated by bureaucracy and lack of time. From what the other team leaders have said until now, we will see Alpha 2 releases in this cycle although they might run a few days late, given that they are only now talking about it.