Ubuntu 14.10 Released With Ambitious Name, But Small Changes

Ubuntu 14.10, dubbed Utopic Unicorn, has been released today (here are screenshots). PC World says that at first glance "isn't the most exciting update," with not so much as a new default wallpaper — but happily so: it's a stable update in a stable series, and most users will have no pressing need to update to the newest version. In the Ubuntu Next unstable series, though, there are big changes afoot: Along with Mir comes the next version of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, Unity 8. Mir and the latest version of Unity are already used on Ubuntu Phone, so this is key for Ubuntu's goal of convergent computing — Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu desktop will use the same display server and desktop shell. Ubuntu Phone is now stable and Ubuntu phones are arriving this year, so a lot of work has gone into this stuff recently. The road ahead looks bumpy however. Ubuntu needs to get graphics drivers supporting Mir properly. The task becomes more complicated when you consider that other Linux distributions — like Fedora — are switching to the Wayland display server instead of Mir. When Ubuntu Desktop Next becomes the standard desktop environment, the changes will be massive indeed. But for today, Utopic Unicorn is all about subtle improvements and slow, steady iteration.

Comments

The bigger the lie

[Drunkulus]

Haha! A stable update in a stable series? Ubuntu starts off from Debian Unstable and then Canonical adds their own bug-ridden spyware, init process, Unity desktop, etc. Ubuntu is by far the buggiest distribution in history, at last count there are are 115,000 open bugs in the distro. Well, to be fair, that number does seem to be pretty stable.

Re:The bigger the lie

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ridiculous to think that after 2 decades that something as fundamental as "sound" is still a clusterfuck on Linux. The fragmentation and infighting in the community is what holds Linux back so much, you need a dictatorship on the distribution just so it isn't an incoherent mess, just look that the sound subsystems ALSA, OSS, PulseAudio, ESD, aRts and JACK (I'm probably missing more), then you have all the various packages that allow those systems to feed into eachother in various ways that is so messed up you can't even have a reliable software master volume on Linux. None of this shit works together properly! The biggest problem with the Linux community is not technical competence, there is loads of that, it is built of incredibly smart people but these people lack the social skills to work together in a unified way so the result is peppered with brilliance but is an outright mess of incompatibility.

That is why you need dictatorships sometimes, with Android Google takes the position that while there is no one perfect solution that is best for all they do have to make a decision on one system and go that route for their platform so that you dont have everybody going off doing whatever they want which results in a terrible user experience.

A good reason to use Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2014-October/038520.html

Refusing to fix critical/security updates? Throwing the work on their packages to upstream? Thank God we have OSX and don't need wannabe's.

Re:"not so much as a default wallpaper"

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." - Yogi Berra

I finally switched to Mint

[HalAtWork]

I finally switched to Mint with Cinnamon and love it. I appreciate what Ubuntu has done to make Linux usable on the desktop, but in that spirit I am now supporting Mint, which seems to have taken over that position with a great interface that promises consistency.

Re:"not so much as a default wallpaper"

[recharged95]

On a touchscreen laptop, one may want to try either:
Fedora 21 (when it's out)
OpenSuse 13.2 (RC1 or when it's out)

Why?

Wayland, though stiil buggy in opensuse (but functional in Fedora alpha), is a gamechanger for Linux desktops. It is very fast/effficient.
Gnome 3.14 finally looks/is stable, polished and works very well with touchscreens for gestures and such. Gnome maybe has redeemed some trust in this release.
Latest kernel with laptop power management is much improved in these versions(though the same could be said for ubuntu)

Re:"not so much as a default wallpaper"

[Richy_T]

Pft, Microsoft, such a crappy UI (quick, lets make our own as much like it as we can).

It almost makes me weep when I think of some of the great UI features that have fallen by the way-side from *nix desktops in favor of chasing Microsoft's (and to a lesser extent Apple's) missteps.