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

Re:Because wallpaper is what matters most

[jamiesan]

Aren't Curtains and Drapes the same thing? I thought we wanted to know if the Curtains matched the Carpet... and preferred hard wood floors...?

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.