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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.
To busy reviewing the Apple/Microsoft bling to realize that computer OSes really shouldn't be about what color the drapes are.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Does it still ship with the spyware-inspired keylogger which sends everything you search for to Canonical and others?
WHAT?
I'm not installing such a crap update. Why would they leave out the most important thing?
Vexing Vabbit.
And for Elmer Fudd, certainly ambitious.
Vivacious Vivisectionist?
I come here for the love
Vaginal Vulture
Vivacious Velociraptor.
If they dont use V* Velociraptor I will personally wrrite a strongly worded letter deploring them for their utter lack of humour and sense of awesome.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
Volumetric Vagina
If "Utopic Unicorn" is an ambitious name, I'm afraid to see what comes next.
utopia = ideal, perfect state
unicorn = magical, legendary creature
I think you'd roll your eyes too if Apple or Microsoft came out with OS X 10.10 "Magic Perfection" or Windows 10 "Magic Perfection", respectively. It's the kind of name that makes you go "Okaaaaaaaaay, are you overcompensating for something?"
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yes, they used to push everything new into LTS, figure ing they wanted it to be not ancient for most of its life . it was a mistake though , because they were always terrible , I think this is learning from said mistakes .
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Oh boy, I can't wait for all of the compromises you have to make to get a system usable on a small touchscreen to be ported over to my mouse and keyboard equipped desktop. I hope they go all the way and remove keyboard support so I can hunt and peck with the mouse on an onscreen keyboard with crappy predictive text. Also, make sure every app defaults to fullscreen, because that's what I want on a 3840x2160 display. I also hope they do away with onscreen menus and make everything gigantic buttons because I hate efficient use of screen space.
I read the internet for the articles.
Vivid Vervet
115,000 open bugs in how many different packages/projects that comprise the entirety of the OS? A hair over 70k, so averaging less than 2 bugs per package. And of those 70k packages, how many are installed on a default Ubuntu desktop system? On my server, there are only 660; that's including server packages that a desktop wouldn't have and excluding desktop packages that my server doesn't need, so I don't know if the desktop install has more or less.
Statistically, assuming even distribution of bugs across all packages in the system, I should expect to be affected by about 1100 bugs. There are some real questions that need to be asked, though. For instance: How many of those bug reports are actually valid? How many were fixed upstream and simply never closed? How many are stupid shit like "this text should be in that font" versus the number that actually impact performance or productivity? And, most importantly, how does Ubuntu compare with other distros, offering fewer packages overall, in bugs-per-package?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Actually reading the thread (I know, this is /. and that doesn't happen), the issue is that OwnCloud wanted the package removed from an *already released* repository, which Ubuntu refused, so as not to affect users actually using it, while providing three possible interim solutions. The end result was removal of the package from the repo of the next release. Problem solved.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
As someone who recently had to do hand-to-hand combat with Xubuntu 14.04 to get certain features working at all (like detecting a second monitor on the HDMI port), I can state that certain packages are going to be way more jam-packed with bugs than others.
HDMI support seems to pretty much suck, with Pulseaudio being a close second.
A few words for the developers of things like Pulseaudio and the maintainers of various distributions, most (but not all) of which end with "buntu":
I'm really not sure why a common sound subsystem is so hard that there have to be 10 of them and they all have to be incompatible with each other. The same goes for window managers. X11 has had the network terminal considerations of client audio, video, and input nailed down for the better part of 40 years. Why are these local-machine-only systems that are cropping up sucking so hard? It's got to be easier than X11, just by virtue of leaving out the intricacies of that whole "you might be processing this on a different continent from where the user is sitting" part.
Even Microsoft has their shit working better than this. Microsoft! You hate those guys! Fix your shit!
I only ever install the LTS releases any more. I don't have time to waste upgrading the OS.
Consider how long Windows goes before a major version upgrade. The 6-month cycle of Ubuntu is too short.
As I have been saying for years, Ubuntu should do an LTS "core" released every 2 years or whatever long cycle. That core would not contain things such as Firefox, LibreOffice, etc. It would literally just be the core Linux services. Everything else can be upgraded on the fly with rolling updates.
Pulseaudio bugs should be reported to a certain Lennart Poettering (you may have heard about him before) and became standard thanks to Red Hat. ALSA was fine, and OSS wasn't bad either (it was the licensing they didn't like IIRC).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.
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.
Twinstiq, game news
The main reason for a six month release cycle is to provide drivers for new hardware.
Since hardware drivers are integrated with the kernel and window system, supporting new drivers requires upgrading the core system.
If aren't upgrading your hardware constantly, there's no reason to update beyond the latest LTS. If you're buying this week's Nvidia card or a laptop with a new wireless card, then you'll want to use the latest Ubuntu release to get support for it.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Slackware. Just about.
To which Ubuntu forum users massively agreed that this would make a great release name !