Canonical, as expected, launched Ubuntu 11.10 today. Although it seems like just yesterday that Mark Shuttleworth’s announcement of the codename for Ubuntu 11.10 had me googling the terms “oneiric” and “oncelot,” the development cycle of the latest Ubuntu release is officially complete as of today. That means Canonical has introduced the 15th iteration of the world’s most popular Linux distribution has debuted. What does that mean for us users? Here’s a look.
I have to admit: for me, Ubuntu release days have lost some of the excitement they held in the days of yore. Time there was when I would eagerly download the ISO (via a torrent, of course, to avoid unnecessary load on Canonical’s servers) and install it as soon as I could. But this time around, I feel no sense of urgency. I’ll upgrade when I get to it.
This lack of excitement isn’t due to any fault of Canonical’s, though. On the contrary, it’s because Ubuntu has become so consistent and predictable in its evolution that the release day just doesn’t feel like as big a deal as it used to. Since the first version of Ubuntu, 4.10 or “Warty Warthog,” appeared seven years ago this month, Canonical has churned out a new release every October and April right on schedule. (The singular exception was Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, which was deliberately released a bit later than usual, on June 1, 2006.)
Without the constantly shifting release dates and broken promises by software executives that I expect with other operating systems, things just aren’t as fun!
All the same, Canonical’s regularity regarding Ubuntu is a remarkable accomplishment for any software platform. But it’s particularly impressive in the open-source channel, where a dependency on contributions from volunteers and third-party projects often makes development roadmaps tentative at best.
What’s New In Ubuntu 11.10
The fact that Ubuntu 11.10′s release date has been predictably predictable, of course, doesn’t mean that the features of the new operating system itself are dull by any stretch of the imagination. There’s plenty of new stuff in Oneiric, including but not limited to:
- Lots of usability enhancements for Unity–which is good, because GNOME 2 is no longer installed by default as a fallback option for users who don’t like the Unity interface. (An alternative version of Unity which doesn’t require 3D acceleration is available for computers that can’t handle 3D effects.)
- Firefox 7.0 replaces 6.0 as the default Web browser, and…
- Mozilla also comes out on top for email, with Evolution removed in favor of Thunderbird as the default mail client.
- Major enhancements to the Ubuntu Software Center.
An official promotional video highlights some of these updates:
In addition, changes that might receive less notice from desktop users but which are equally significant for Ubuntu from a broader perspective include:
- For the first time, Ubuntu runs a Linux 3.0+ kernel.
- Official support for more ARM architectures.
- Ubuntu Core debuts for embedded devices.
- The official launch of the “Ubuntu Friendly” community-based hardware-validation program.
And there you have it: my own laissez-faire attitude about this release notwithstanding, there are plenty of new features and initiatives to watch for in the Oneiric release. But don’t take my word for it. Download it yourself now.
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“Ubuntu has become so consistent and predictable in its evolution”… Really? Seems Steve’s reality distortion field has moved.
Martin P: really? In april I knew that 11.10 would be released today. I also know that the next version of Ubuntu will be released Thursday April 26th 2012, probably around noon. That’s predictable, isn’t it? And it’s likely that the fifth version from now will be released April 24th 2014. Because it _is_ consistent. And predictable. Can you say this about OS X or Windows?
Martin P@1: The author wasn’t suggesting that Canonical has become perfect, merely predictable in its release dates… hard to debate that…
Jo-Erlend@2: Can we count on you to jump back into the conversation when Ubuntu 12.04 arrives in April 2012?
[...] Oneiric OcelotThe next release of Ubuntu,October 2011,is Oneiric Ocelot.Reviews are here and here. Release notes are here. The Ubuntu home page is here. The conventional Download page is here.The [...]
Does the fact that Thunderbird replaced Evolution mean that we can now sync contacts from Thunderbird to U1? If so that may be my sole reason for upgrading.
Jay: I haven’t tried this personally yet but my understanding is that it will work.
[...] Ubuntu 11.10 debuted today. Best-known as a desktop Linux distribution, Ubuntu 11.10 also has server and cloud aspirations. [...]
yeah let’s just name drop and use buzz words to make our comments appear meaningful. Martin P is a troll that is full of hogwash. He needs to stop watching tv / staring at the internet as a source for his own thoughts and opinions; stop regurgitating other people’s words.
“Ubuntu has become so consistent and predictable in its evolution” It appears to to me to be evolving into an Apple. I generally like apples, but not the kind Ubuntu is becoming.
I like that release name. Although it is a bit of an Apple rip-off with the cat theme.
Replaced 11.04 classic with 11.10 in my old (2001) machine.
When I installed 11.04, it had to fall back to Classic. Not so with 11.10 However, it is now so slow, I have to revert to terminal to start any applications.
If Ubuntu keeps changing the outlay with each release, users who are used to Microsoft will find it hard to find anything. I don’t like the way ubuntu hides applications
Jeff: I see your point, but I don’t agree. Sure, Ubuntu learns from OS X. It learns from Windows as well. And they learn from each other, and they learn from Ubuntu, because Ubuntu does some things that none of them have done before.
August: Do you remember the hierarchical web directories? They were just what it says. They were directories of all the websites on the internet. Nothing quite says impractical like “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. This company, now better known as Yahoo! started out as a menu of the web, very similar in nature to the one provided by Windows 95, which was a large inspiration to the Gnome developers back then.
I’m not trying to ridicule anyone or anything. I simply want to point out that the world has changed and that most people are used to searching for what they want, possibly adding bookmarks for some of the content. I’ve stopped using bookmarks too, since Firefox lets me search by entering text in the address bar instead of providing a URI. If Unity (not Ubuntu) hides your applications, then Google hides the web. I don’t think that’s true. I think they make it more visible and accessible, just like Unity does for your desktop. The web is no longer something you surf. You use the web as if it were a part of your computer. I don’t know how many web applications I use, but they’re many. Why should a modern desktop separate local applications and webapps? Because until very recently, it was just not practical to let you navigate them the same way you navigated local apps. Having hundreds of webapps in your menus wouldn’t work. Unity fixes that problem. It learns from your searches, so you seldom have to type more than a few characters to launch something. If I want to update the system, then I type “up”. If I want to play a game of Wesnoth, then I type “wes”. If I want to play some music from Nellie McKay, then I type “mck”. I no longer spend more than five seconds to launch anything, no matter where it is or what it is, as long as the system knows it’s something I’m interested in. Just like you need a little time to learn Unity, Unity needs a little time to learn you, but then it’s lightning fast to work with. This will only improve as we get more intelligence, scopes and lenses.
Unity _is_ different, and you need to get used to it. But once you do, you’ll see that using search is much more efficient than using static menus to locate your stuff. For your 20-30 most used apps (that’s many), you have the launcher. This not only provides you with dynamic keyboard shortcuts, but also provides you with menus for the ~10 most likely things you’ll want to do. Most apps haven’t started to use these properly yet, so they’re fairly static or even empty. But apps are able to easily learn from your actions and present quicklists with appropriate entries, based on how you use the system. Quite nice.
In short, the system should adapt itself to fit your mind. It’s not your mind that should adapt to the system. This is the big difference between Unity and systems made out of static menus.
So.. Having seen the first couple of comments I re-read the article and thought my first, while perhaps a little brief, was not inappropriate. However, given dave’s carefully crafted missive…..
I really don’t read the article as being entirely about the regular release cycle (although if Christopher asserts just that, then fair enough). The regular release cycle isn’t news on any kind of level any more, more newsworthy is the tendency for Ubuntu to be quite unpredictable.
Yes, decisions are made in public on the whole (that doesn’t mean Ubuntu is a democracy [sorry, dave -that's me using someone else's words again
]), and public beta programmes mean that major changes are fairly well understood before GA release, but that doesn’t mean that the lurches from one direction to another are not really annoying.
The most obvious example is that of the desktop environment. It wasn’t that long ago that te standard Gnome3 shell was in the frame, before Unity appeared – by some measure, quite prematurely.
Another example is the removal of Sun/Oracle Java from standard repos. I appreciate that Java is a tad controvertial but unless one follows all distro-related conversations, it would be difficult to predict that, and it has given folk pain.
Never mind the lurch of focus from desktop to server to netbook to cloud (and is there phone in there too somewhere?)
The LTS releases are IMO (that is, MY opinion), providing a sense of false security that allows a little too much experimentation in public. Finding different (hopefully better) ways of doing things is commendable and I will continue to use Ubuntu wherever I can for that reason among others. But thats not being predictable, by definition.
Martin P: Ubuntu is not experimenting for fun. It was necessary to replace Gnome 2 and it had to be done now because of the upcoming LTS. It’s a massive undertaking, of course, and nothing like this have ever been done in Ubuntu before, considering that the last major upgrade of the Gnome platform was ten years ago. Unity was indeed prematurely added as the default shell, and this was necessary in order to get the massive amounts of feedback required to make it really solid and polished for the LTS. Gnome Shell has never been used by Ubuntu, but it was at one time, one of the available options. The goals were incompatible and sometimes it’s better to fork than compromise. In 15 versions of Ubuntu, it has switched shell _once_. That is not “lurching from one direction to another”, as you put it. That’s being highly stable, consistent and predictable.
This has been an big exception and it’s been bumpy, but then the results are also quite dashing. Now that everything is in place, it’ll be nice to go back to having a stable environment and to get incremental improvements.
Jo-Erlend Schinstad,
About the introduction of Unity… I’ll leave it at this. I think Canonical missed an opportunity to make use of PPAs effectively in the Unity introduction. Wherease the GNOME 3 transition team inside Ubuntu used PPAs in the 11.04 cycle to introduce GNOME 3 in a much more gentle way and avoid large disruption, and will end up having a very good GNOME 3 experience for LTS. And didn’t unity2d (qt based unity) use PPAs initially to roll out the experience to users? The forced injection of Unity into the tight time based release model back in the 10.10 release (mutter based unity) went against some of the foundational tenants of that release model concept. You are suppose to be able to punt immature features if they aren’t ready in a time based release model. Canonical is mixing feature-base and time-based model in some of their self-identified critical development and I don’t think its been implemented well as a process. But hindsight is always 20/20 and I realize that some of this need is based on business pressure which Canonical can’t talk about it. Hopefully there’s been a lessones learned moment or two inside the fenceline. Clearly they lost some business with their handling of Unity in 10.10, Unity based Ubuntu Light really never saw the light of day after the Dell UDS demo (with sustained wild applause of appreciation in the video). I never saw a Dell system with it pre-installed for sale, and Ubuntu Light has not been resurrected (even as a talking point) in the compiz or qt re-write for 11.04 or 11.10. Canonical really thought they could do the work for Unity in one release cycle and build a new product category (Ubuntu Light) around it. This new talk about making it solid by LTS is a reformulated game plan. The original game plan was far different.
Now about LTS…. How relevant is LTS really in the consumer desktop market? Does it make sense to only target LTS for a stable environment when OEMs are pre-installing the standard releases?
Device OEMs are _not_ shipping LTS pre-installed, They are shipping the 6 months releases on new hardware. I would imagine because they really need the hardwawre enablement that linux kernel+plumbing provide as new hardware become available.
Just look at the new vodacom netbook announcement from South Africa. Shipping this week with 11.04 Ubuntu on it….not LTS..not even 11.10. And none of the established Ubuntu vendors in the US or UK ship consumer device product with LTS pre-installed as an option. LTS probably has some staying power with server camps and in the cloud. But consumer desktop? There’s no data from the years of OEM behavior that LTS matters one iota. They ship product with the latest release and move on.
Given what OEMs are doing, achieving “really solid and polished for the LTS” may be a hollow victory when the goal is increased consumer device adoption. Development and productization are out of step. And quite frankly I see Canonical moving further and further away from being able to build a business around servicing device OEMs, because Canonical doesn’t actually seem to be providing a platform cadence that makes sense for them. To OEMs LTS is just another release.
-jef
Obviously, business is not irrelevant to a company, but the decision to stay close to upstream Gnome, was not primarily a business issue. Sharing the development efforts is important to any distro. You seem to be rather obsessed with Canonical as a business when you’re talking about Ubuntu. I don’t mean that as an insult, but I think you’re too focused on that aspect. There are no stockholders who are pressuring Canonical to stay close to Gnome.
«The forced injection of Unity into the tight time based release model back in the 10.10 release (mutter based unity) went against some of the foundational tenants of that release model concept.»
Well, you mention Unity in 10.10 twice, but it was only used by default in 11.04. Everyone knew that was very early, but it was necessary to drop Gnome 2 as quickly as possible, including Gnome Panel. Knowing that a new shell was underway, it was decided to use it by default anyway, in order to really shake everything up. I think that was a wise move, simply because it causes a lot more feedback, which in turn speeds up development and helps gather more information about how users experience it in real-life. Yes, it left the default desktop a little bumpy, with a five-second way to go back to the old shell if you didn’t like it, or had technical issues with it. I’ve used it all along, and in my experience, it hasn’t been horrible, just not as polished as earlier versions of Ubuntu. I would still prefer to use Unity in 11.04 rather than Gnome Shell in 11.10, though I do like Gnome Shell as well. Considering the vast underlying changes, I’m really surprised about how smoothly the transition has been made. The switch to KDE 4.0 was a lot worse and took a lot longer to stabilize. But Unity in 11.10 is quite nice — Unity 2D as well — and I’m sure it wouldn’t have come quite as far in this short time span if it didn’t get all the extra attention. Now it’s time to smoothen it out and go back to the familiar way of gradually improving from version to version. I think most of us are looking forward to that. These last months have been rather dizzying.
«Device OEMs are _not_ shipping LTS pre-installed, They are shipping the 6 months releases on new hardware.»
At least that used to be the case, but obviously a bad idea. You have a bad habit of not backing up your claims. Exactly what OEMs is it you’re referring to when you say that OEMs will not stick to the LTSes in their future products? I pay fairly close attention, and I don’t think I’ve read anything about that.
«Device OEMs are _not_ shipping LTS pre-installed, They are shipping the 6 months releases on new hardware. I would imagine because they really need the hardwawre enablement that linux kernel+plumbing provide as new hardware become available. »
This is exactly why LTSes do get updated kernels. Perhaps you weren’t aware of that? But have you considered the possibility that OEMs have shipped 11.04 because it was more modern and fancy? But we see here another example of your tunnel vision when it comes to Canonical and business. Focusing on the LTS obviously is not just a matter of consumer space or OEMs. Lots of users prefer to have a stable environment and not upgrade so often. I still have 10.04 on some of my computers, and it’s still a very nice environment. I look forward to upgrading to 12.04 on them, but that means it have to be a high quality desktop, like 10.04 is. It’s looking very good.
You state that the goal is increased consumer device adoption. Where did you get that idea? The goal is to increase the number of users, not the number of sold computers. The vast majority of Ubuntu users didn’t get it pre-installed on a new computer. They downloaded it and installed it. That’s what most users are going to come from in the future as well.
system76 is not shipping lts in the customize options for non-servers
zareason is not shipping lts in the customize options for non-servers
in the US stores.
Dell? Is Dell even selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu of any version currently in the US store? I’m having a hell of a time finding one.
Can you point me to any OEM who is shipping the current LTS on non-server hardware? Show me LTS as a target for the _desktop_ interface deliverable is still relevant. Because Unity is not relevant in the cloud nor to the server really. Its consumer device oriented and I can’t find any Ubuntu friendly OEM shipping LTS on consumer devices right now. It really doesn’t matter if LTS gets updated kernels or not. OEMs who are shipping Ubuntu branded products, are not sitting on LTS releases. Canonical really needs to figure why that is.
And as for Unity as default… pretty sure Unity was _default_ for the Ubuntu Light OEM deliverable that was demoed and was _expected_ to show up on Dell pre-installed and then didn’t happen. Unity as default in Ubuntu the project is immaterial to my point. Canonical planned to pump out an OEM product deliverable in that first cycle. It was called Ubuntu Light. It was meant to be an out of the gate revenue stream for Unity development. It never happened. And noone has talked about it in the 10.10 or 11.04 timeframes. It just got taken out back and buried. Burying your potential revenue streams over and over again is a pretty bad business track record.
And no I am _not_ talking about Ubuntu the project. I am most assuredly talking and have been talking about Canonical the corporate business entity. Unity is a Canonical deliverable, not an Ubuntu project deliverable. It’s only the default in Ubuntu because Canonical, and its business interests, holds a very special, singular, position in the Ubuntu community for better or for worst, till death do them part. And moreover, Unity continues to be subject to a Canonical Contributor License Agreement, not an Ubuntu project license agreement blessed by any form of Ubuntu project governance.
And if I’m the only one who seems to focus on Canonical as a _business_ that’s certainly not a good sign for the health of Canonical as a corporate entity. Surely the VAR Guy and the other staff writers here care about Canonical as a _business_ considering the whole point of this site is _business_ channel focused. If Canonical as a business is not suppose to be the focus here than its probably not appropriate to consider it a business at all.
-jef
The first words of my comment were: «Obviously, business is not irrelevant to a company». But one more time: the fact that most OEMs haven’t prioritized LTS in the past, does not prove that providing an appetizing LTS in the future is pointless, like you claim. You’ve also claimed that no OEMs will base their products on LTSes in the future, and you seem to base that on the idea that nobody wants an OS that’s more than six months old. Well, that’s obviously false. And when you claim that they’re not using LTSes, you seem to completely reject the possibility that OEMs want to sell products that look modern. 10.04 is a very good operating system, but it doesn’t look very modern.
You are extremely focused on consumers and computers with Ubuntu pre-installed. Why is that? The majority of PC users do not have Ubuntu, but they do have a computer. Downloading Ubuntu is much cheaper than purchasing a new PC. By the way, have you noticed that quite a few users still prefer to use Windows XP, even though there are newer versions of Windows available? What about businesses. Do you think they will prefer to upgrade their computers twice a year, or once every three years? Most likely, Canonicals main objective is to increase the number of users. As part of that, obviously it’s nice if computers are sold with Ubuntu pre-installed. But that’s only a small part. The number of users is important because that creates economical opportunities for third-parties, which in turn makes the operating system more attractive. It’s about starting a feedback loop, not about the number of sold computers.
Even the suggestion that long-lasting software is pointless, seems very strange to me. I certainly prefer it. Unity makes me a lot more productive and I’m looking forward to sticking with 12.04 on more of my computers.
@Sam: After trying to patent the common word apple, and the representation of an Apple (when it comes to logos), I think it’s enough and Apple definitely doesn’t have the monopoly of the common felids’ names, so please…
[...] Canonical Releases Ubuntu 11.10 Linux Distribution Upgrade [...]