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Ubuntu Upgrades Linux

Ubuntu 14.10 Released With Ambitious Name, But Small Changes 110

Posted by timothy from the I'd-hoped-for-ubiquitous dept.
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.
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Ubuntu 14.10 Released With Ambitious Name, But Small Changes More

Ubuntu 14.10 Released With Ambitious Name, But Small Changes

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  • Because wallpaper is what matters most (Score:3)

    by Overzeetop ( 214511 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @03:50PM (#48215551) Journal

    To busy reviewing the Apple/Microsoft bling to realize that computer OSes really shouldn't be about what color the drapes are.

    • OSs should be about refinement, not about throwing everything out to get ready for the new release. Things should be fairly familiar, even if the last update was a year or so ago. So why bother changing the wallpaper, if it was 'good enough' last time. Spend the time adjusting the icons to make them look good at different screen sizes or something else that needs to be tweaked in the UI.

      That being said, I'm skipping updating OSs for a bit. I'm on an LTE of a downstream OS and things are good enough that

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )
      It is handy to have a standard wallpaper for each version for quick identification

  • Spyware status? (Score:3)

    by kthreadd ( 1558445 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @03:53PM (#48215567)

    Does it still ship with the spyware-inspired keylogger which sends everything you search for to Canonical and others?

  • If "Utopic Unicorn" is an ambitious name, I'm afraid to see what comes next.

  • WHAT?

    I'm not installing such a crap update. Why would they leave out the most important thing?

    • Why would they leave out the most important thing?

      As most users have already defected to other distros, it was not worth the effort!

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

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

    • You're misunderstanding. There's no default wallpaper because the wallpaper now consists of Unity's equivalent to Metro tiles. It's not so much one wallpaper as it is multiple animated posters.

      • Re:"not so much as a default wallpaper" (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Richy_T ( 111409 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @07:28PM (#48216931) Homepage

        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.

      • Unity's equivalent to Metro tiles

        I don't know if this is a joke, because when I install Ubuntu these days I kill Unity and replace it with Gnome before doing anything else. But I sure hope so.

    • Re:"not so much as a default wallpaper" (Score:5, Informative)

      by qubezz ( 520511 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @07:11PM (#48216807)
      If you want a significantly modernized UI that hasn't been designed for dummies, have a look at KDE Plasma 5 [arstechnica.com]. Kubuntu was simultaneously released in 14.10 flavor, and there are tech preview ISOs [kubuntu.org] available now with the new desktop. It has a new wallpaper, also.

    • Re:"not so much as a default wallpaper" (Score:4, Interesting)

      by recharged95 ( 782975 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @07:18PM (#48216875) Journal

      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: (Score:2)

      by darkain ( 749283 )

      The Windows 10 preview doesn't come with Minesweeper... Ubuntu had to compete SOMEHOW!

  • I have had quite enough reimagining thank you. Just make it smoother, more reliable, more options, fix bugs please.

  • The bigger the lie (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Drunkulus ( 920976 )
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by BronsCon ( 927697 ) <social@bronstrup.com> on Thursday October 23, 2014 @05:25PM (#48216125) Journal
      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?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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 commo

        • Re:The bigger the lie (Score:4, Insightful)

          by armanox ( 826486 ) <asherewindknight@yahoo.com> on Thursday October 23, 2014 @06:00PM (#48216339) Homepage Journal

          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).

          • Re:The bigger the lie (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23, 2014 @06:19PM (#48216493)

            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.

          • Woohoo! Anybody need me to light their torch? Pitchforks are over there, to your right...
      • Perhaps we could make a comparison with the upstream source of Ubuntu? Let me see...
        Oh NOES right on the Debian wiki it says that Unstable might have horrible bugs! And if you run it on a server you are insane!
        And... it says Debian's security team only covers Stable. Maybe this is why the Ubuntu forums got hacked and every user account, password and email address was stolen?
        https://wiki.debian.org/Debian... [debian.org]
        • Well, yes, Ubuntu forks its development releases from Debian's development release, which would be Debian Unstable. That would seem to make sense, and they're not just taking Debian's Unstable branch, throwing their branding onto it, and calling it an Ubuntu release. Way to throw half-facts out there and spread FUD, though.
          • Funny enough, that's exactly what happens! As I outlined earlier, they take Debian Unstable, add their own stuff like Unity and Mir which no other distro will ever use, and that's Ubuntu Feisty Fanboi. Not a drop of fear, uncertainty, or doubt here. It's on the Ubuntu wiki:
            "Most source packages in all Ubuntu components are copied unmodified from Debian."
            https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu... [ubuntu.com]
            • "Most". You make it sound like they never fix *any* bugs. Funny, in the past month I've updated a few dozen packages and about 1/3 of those were security updates, so it sure looks like they're covering their bases regardless of their upstream provider's security team. For example, I didn't see any remarkable delay in the release for Shellshock patches; Ubuntu had them all out before CentOS, for example, and they were available for my Ubuntu systems by the time Debian had them out. I oversee systems running
              • Oh God. That's a pretty remarkable claim considering that no one at Canonical had anything to do with the discovery or the patching of the bug. Let's have a quick look at the actual sequence of events:
                1. Shellshock was discovered by Stéphane Chazelas, who reported it to bash maintainer Chet Ramey and a few others, and assigned CVE identifier CVE-2014-6271.
                2. "CVE-2014-6271: remote code execution through bash" by Florian Weimer of Red Hat (2014-09-24) was one of the first public disclosures of the p
                • What claim that I supposedly made are you arguing? My claim was based on my own personal experience; I went to patch my CentOS boxes first and there was no patch available, so I patched my Debian and Ubuntu boxes, then came back and the patch was available for CentOS. I never claimed that Canonical had any involvement in creating the patch, which appears to be the point you're arguing. RedHat likely had the patch in their repos before anyone, as the developer of the patch, as you correctly point out, works

  • A good reason to use Ubuntu (Score:1, Interesting)

    by 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.

  • Just what I want (Score:4, Funny)

    by jandrese ( 485 ) <kensama@vt.edu> on Thursday October 23, 2014 @04:57PM (#48215955) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Anyone else not bother with the interm releases? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23, 2014 @05:59PM (#48216333)

    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.

    • Re:Anyone else not bother with the interm releases (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chandon Seldon ( 43083 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @07:33PM (#48216961) Homepage

      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.

      • However LTS releases periodically update the kernel, I assume for the same driver (as well as security) reasons, or is this different? The main drawback I see with LTS is that many application packages remain old, so you miss out on new features to LibreOffice etc.

      • Like Google has been doing with Android. Strip it down to it's core and then they release little things as apps. I think there is a lot of stuff that gets installed automatically in Ubuntu that I would never use. Most of my issues with ubuntu or it's variants have been with video and sound. Video seems to be greatly improved in 14.04 but now sound issues keep popping up. I'm sticking to the LTS releases as well. I'm sick of having new bugs or even old bugs reappear with each update. I also gave up on

    • Windows major version upgrades are fast as a tachyon, we have Windows 10 before 9 even came out.

    • The LTS releases do update the Firefox, Chrome and Thunderbird major versions. So far as I know, those are the only three packages which update major version numbers in an LTS, as the major version numbers of those software are as point releases of other software.

  • Oh, great. They can inflict Unity on miserable people on two platforms.

    • So this version w/ small changes doesn't have Mir as yet?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bswarm ( 2540294 )
      I just install Ubuntu Gnome, then Gnome Fallback (called Flashback now) that way I don't have Unity leftovers. Unity sucks donkey wang if you ask me.

  • I finally switched to Mint (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HalAtWork ( 926717 ) on Thursday October 23, 2014 @06:57PM (#48216697)
    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.

  • Has the audio theme changed? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Has the audio theme changed yet or is it still the jungle/bongo sounds?

  • This is the perfect time to remind everyone of this comment [lwn.net] made by Linus back in 2008: "...Digg users - you're all a bunch of Wanking Walruses".

    To which Ubuntu forum users massively agreed that this would make a great release name [ubuntuforums.org] !

  • I don't mind Unity so much and Ubuntu is still my distro of choice. Having a persistent taskbar is a hellofalot better than Gnome. But I have to nagging complaints about the utter lack of customization with Unity: 1. Cannot click a taskbar app icon to minimize. It's buried in Compiz settings somewhere but I didn't see it in 14.10, I'll look again. 2. Cannot move the taskbar to bottom. Just... wow.

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