Mark Shuttleworth | here be dragons

As prep for the upcoming 14.04 LTS release of Ubuntu I spent some quality time with each of the main flavours that I track – Kubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Xubuntu, and Ubuntu with the default DE, Unity.

They are all in really great shape! Thanks and congratulations to the teams that are racing to deliver Trusty versions of their favourite DE’s. I get the impression that all the major environments are settling down from periods of rapid change and stress, and the timing for an LTS release in 14.04 is perfect. Lucky us 🙂

The experience reminded me of something people say about Ubuntu all the time – that it’s a place where great people bring diverse but equally important interests together, and a place where people create options for others of which they are proud. You want options? This is the place to get them. You want to collaborate with amazing people? This is the place to find them. I’m very grateful to the people who create those options – for all of them it’s as much a labour of love as a professional concern, and their attention to detail is what makes the whole thing sing.

Of course, my testing was relatively lightweight. I saw tons of major improvements in shared apps like LibreOffice and Firefox and Chromium, and each of the desktop environments feels true to its values, diverse as those are. What I bet those teams would appreciate is all of you taking 14.04 for a spin yourselves. It’s stable enough for any of us who use Linux heavily as an engineering environment, and of course you can use a live boot image off USB if you just want to test drive the future. Cloud images are also available for server testing on all the major clouds.

Having the whole team, and broader community, focus on processes that support faster development at higher quality has really paid off. I’ve upgraded all my systems to Trusty and those I support from afar, too, without any issues. While that’s mere anecdata, the team has far more real data to support a rigorous assessment of 14.04’s quality than any other open platform on the planet, and it’s that rigour that we can all celebrate as the release date approached. There’s still time for tweaks and polish; if you are going to be counting on Trusty, give it a spin and let’s make sure it’s perfect.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 12th, 2014 at 6:32 am and is filed under ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.