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Ubuntu Dev Summit Lays Out Plans For Hardy Heron
Opurt writes "On the first day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston this week, a roundtable session focused on the vision for the upcoming Hardy Heron Ubuntu release. Unlike Gutsy Gibbon, which brought a handful of experimental features along with some new functionality, the focus with Heron will be on robustness as it will be supported on the desktop for 3 years. 'The Compiz window manager, which adds sophisticated visual effects to the Ubuntu user interface, will be a big target for usability improvements. Keyboard bindings and session management were noted as two areas where Compiz still needs some work.' PolicyKit and Tracker will also be significantly tweaked, while Heron is also likely to see a complete visual refresh."
Here's a better summary of things to come in Hardy, linked from an OS News posting.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
If I was asked what things annoyed me most about Feisty (Offtopic?!), I would have said two things: Printers and all that stuff you needed Automatix for. Everything else was pretty much fine.
Along comes Gutsy and... Printers, wow! - doesn't get easier, and Automatix? I've been using Gutsy for about 2 months now and I still haven't downloaded Automatix (Sorry guys, great tool - but don't need it anymore)
Gutsy brings Ubuntu to a level where it can really stand up against the likes of Windows (even coming out better in a lot of surveys than Vista). Compiz is incredible - and anyone I know with Windows stands open-mouthed when they see it.
Heron really needs to up the level way beyond what it is at now, and become the Windows Slayer. I have no idea how they would do that though.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
The numbering system in Ubuntu is based on year, month of release (e.g 7.10) Obviously in development no-one knows if they are going to meet the deadline or miss it like they did with 6.06. This is the reason that the code names are used.
To make it clearer, development has just started on Hardy Heron, or what is likely to be known as 8.04. To start development the Ubuntu devs create repositories named after the codename (e.g. Hardy). If they used 8.04 and the deadline was missed and the release was actually 8.06 they wouldn't easily be able to change the repositories and other stuff.
The names are just code names, after release the number is the identifier that is used by Ubuntu (see if you can see 'Gutsy' on the Ubuntu.com front page, it's not there) its just usually the the code-names stick it peoples' minds.
So to sum up, the code names are there for a perfectly logical reason, and the animal thing is just a consistent naming theme that was chosen.
Right now the biggest fault with Ubuntu is Gnome. I've been using Ubuntu since the day Gutsy was released (previously a Gentoo user) and I love so many aspects of it. I even like the simplicity of Gnome compared to KDE. But, why does Gnome lack so many customization options. I mean, seriously, with so many developers it cannot be very difficult to create some small programs that modify GConf. That should be Gnome's priority and because Ubuntu relies so heavily on Gnome it needs to be one of Ubuntu's priorities to get the ball rolling.
I want to add different folders to my Places bar at the top of the screen, I want to add different buttons (like the Home folder, seriously, it was difficult) to the desktop. I want to be able to edit my Network servers in the Places bar.
I've figured out how to do all of this with gconf but there is absolutely no reason for me to not to be able to go into my System tab and figure out how to do this with a nice, pretty graphical program.
This post may be a little off topic and I know that Ubuntu comes in different flavors (Kubuntu, Xubuntu) but when the majority of users are going to be using Gnome with Ubuntu, then Gnome needs to improve to the point where it does not detract from the Ubuntu experience.