Next Ubuntu Linux To Be a Maverick

VincenzoRomano writes "While the latest version of Ubuntu is still smoking hot, the Ubuntu development community is already working on the next step. Both the wiki and the bug tracking system at Launchpad have already been set up for Maverick Meerkat, which will be version number 10.10. This confirms the usual naming and numbering schema and the fact that the final release should be due in October. This next version, which obviously won't be Long Term Support (LTS), should sport a lighter and faster environment with GNOME 3.0, a.k.a. GNOME Shell, among the main advances. Everything has been explained by Mr. Shuttleworth in his own blog since the beginning of April. The first alpha release is not due earlier than the end of June, so maybe it'd be better to take advantage of the Lucid Lynx while the technical overview of the Meerkat starts getting more details."

Comments

Sounds good!

[Scholasticus]

I know, I know, "'Ubuntu' is an African word meaning 'I'm too stupid for Slackware'" ... I don't use it myself (I use another distribution, not going to plug it here), but I've installed it for a number of friends and family members, and just installed Lynx for my brother, because: 1) Ease of install/configuration 2) Pretty easy transition from Windows 3) Lots of software in the repos And some other reasons. LL is pretty sweet, so I think Shuttleworth & Co. are on the right track in many, if not all, ways. So I think the announcement is pretty exciting. Gnome 3 looks very promising ... so next June' Maverick Meerkat could be pretty interesting.

Re:Should have aimed for 10/10/10

[ElectricTurtle]

Yeah, too bad that date is politicized because it is the national day of Taiwan/ROC. It could be interpreted as attempting to honor Taiwan and by extension provoke the PRC. You might think it's silly, but believe me, the PRC tracks every little thing that happens in connection with Taiwan, even things that might only be coincidentally symbolic.

Re:Ubuntu 6 month cycle

[MBGMorden]

From release to release? Yeah, the improvements tend to be incremental so you're not going to see anything Earth-shattering. That's just the "frog boiling in the pot" effect though. Compare Ubuntu today with Ubuntu from 3 years ago, and you'll notice HUGE usability improvements. Despite having been a Linux user in a "dual boot and learn it but still spend most of your time in Windows" fashion since 1997, Ubuntu is the first distribution that fully converted me. I'm still on Windows at work, but at home? It's been 3 or 4 months since I've touched Windows. And for the first time, I really haven't felt much of a need to.

Re:sorry, but Ubuntu failed hard this release

[RAMMS EIN]

Interestingly, 10.04 is the first release in a couple of years that has worked without a hitch for me. I installed it on a whim, hoping that it might include a driver with hardware-accelerated 3D for my RV730 video card. I was pleasantly surprised that not only does it include that driver, everything I have tried has actually _worked_, and the experience is a marked improvement over what I was running before.

The only issue I ran into is that GDM would not read my ~/.xsession, but it's not entirely clear if that is a bug or a design choice, and, regardless, there is a fix for it.

For the rest, it's stable, it's fast, it's beautiful, and it's even an LTS release. It's been a while since I've experienced that from Ubuntu, but they seem to have gotten everything I care about right this time.

Keeping in mind your experience, I am curious as to how people in general fare with this release. I share your observation that Ubuntu has been caring more about new features than quality, and I was hoping that they had found their way back to putting together top quality releases. I would really like to know what the trend is, qualitywise.

Re:Release early, release often.

[bcrowell]

That's where the LTS releases come in. If you don't want to upgrade, you don't have to. For years.

For me, the big problem with that is that I can't update my apps without updating the OS as well. This is just the way debian/ubuntu is designed. With jaunty and karmic, I had to upgrade in order to get bug fixes in my apps, but then I got new bugs in the OS.

If I'd still been running Hardy until last month, then I would have been running some ancient, buggy version of Inkscape, for instance. On the other hand, by upgrading I got sound completely broken by pulseaudio.

What OS guys don't seem to understand is that end users don't really care about the OS-level features that seem so exciting to an OS guy. We just want the OS to work so that we can run apps.