Mark Shuttleworth | here be dragons

Congratulations to Team *Buntu on the release of our Artful Aardvark 17.10, featuring all your favourite desktop environments, kubernetes 1.8, the latest OpenStack, and security updates for 9 months, which takes us all the way to our next enterprise release, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

A brumous development cycle always makes for cool-headed work and brisk progress on the back of breem debate.

As always, 18.04 LTS will represent the sum of all our interests.

For those of you with bimodal inclinations, there’s the official upstream Kubernetes-on-Ubuntu spell for ‘conjure-up kubernetes’ with bijou multi-cloud goodness. We also have spells for OpenStack on Ubuntu and Hadoop on Ubuntu, so conjure-up is your one-stop magic shop for at-scale boffo big data, cloud and containers. Working with upstreams to enable fast deployment and operations of their stuff on all the clouds is a beamish way to spend the day.

If your thing is bling, pick a desktop! We’ve defaulted to GNOME, but we’re the space where KDE and GNOME and MATE and many others come together to give users real and easy choice of desktops. And if you’re feeling boned by the lack of Unity in open source, you might want to hop onto the channel and join those who are updating Unity7 for the newest X and kernel graphics in 18.04.

And of course, if your thing is actually a thing with internet smarts, then it’s Ubuntu Core that will get you flying (or driving or gatewaying or routing or, well, anything your thing desires) in a snap.

It takes a booky brilliance to shine, and we celebrate brilliance in all its forms in our community. Thanks to the artists and the advocates, the brains and the documenters, the councils and yes, the crazies who find entirely new ways to contribute, Ubuntu grows and reflects the depth and breadth of free software. For many upstream projects, Ubuntu represents the way most users will enjoy their contribution to society. That’s a big responsibility, and one we take seriously. Leave the bolshy, blithe and branky BS aside, and let’s appeal to all that’s brave and bonzer as we shape the platform on which others will build.

It’s builders that we celebrate – the people that build our upstream applications and packages, the people who build Ubuntu, and the people who build on Ubuntu. In honour of that tireless toil, our mascot this cycle is a mammal known for it’s energetic attitude, industrious nature and engineering prowess. We give it a neatly nerdy 21st century twist in honour of the relentless robots running Ubuntu Core. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 18.04 LTS, the Bionic Beaver.

Watchful observers will have wondered why “W” is yet unnamed! Without wallowing in the wizzo details, let’s just say it’s been a wild and worthy week, and as it happens I had the well-timed opportunity of a widely watched keynote today and thought, perhaps wonkily, that it would be fun to announce it there.

But first, thank you to all who have made such witty suggestions in webby forums. Alas, the “wacky wabbit” and “watery walrus”, while weird enough and wisely whimsical, won’t win the race. The “warty wombat”, while wistfully wonderful, will break all sorts of systems with its wepetition. And the “witchy whippet”, in all its wiry weeness, didn’t make the cut.

Instead, my waggish friends, the winsome W on which we wish will be… the “wily werewolf”.

Enjoy!

Release week! Already! I wouldn’t call Trusty ‘vintage’ just yet, but Utopic is poised to leap into the torrent stream. We’ve all managed to land our final touches to *buntu and are excited to bring the next wave of newness to users around the world. Glad to see the unicorn theme went down well, judging from the various desktops I see on G+.

And so it’s time to open the vatic floodgates and invite your thoughts and contributions to our soon-to-be-opened iteration next. Our ventrous quest to put GNU as you love it on phones is bearing fruit, with final touches to the first image in a new era of convergence in computing. From tiny devices to personal computers of all shapes and sizes to the ventose vistas of cloud computing, our goal is to make a platform that is useful, versal and widely used.

Who would have thought – a phone! Each year in Ubuntu brings something new. It is a privilege to celebrate our tenth anniversary milestone with such vernal efforts. New ecosystems are born all the time, and it’s vital that we refresh and renew our thinking and our product in vibrant ways. That we have the chance to do so is testament to the role Linux at large is playing in modern computing, and the breadth of vision in our virtual team.

To our fledgling phone developer community, for all your votive contributions and vocal participation, thank you! Let’s not be vaunty: we have a lot to do yet, but my oh my what we’ve made together feels fantastic. You are the vigorous vanguard, the verecund visionaries and our venerable mates in this adventure. Thank you again.

This verbose tract is a venial vanity, a chance to vector verbal vibes, a map of verdant hills to be climbed in months ahead. Amongst those peaks I expect we’ll find new ways to bring secure, free and fabulous opportunities for both developers and users. This is a time when every electronic thing can be an Internet thing, and that’s a chance for us to bring our platform, with its security and its long term support, to a vast and important field. In a world where almost any device can be smart, and also subverted, our shared efforts to make trusted and trustworthy systems might find fertile ground. So our goal this next cycle is to show the way past a simple Internet of things, to a world of Internet things-you-can-trust.

In my favourite places, the smartest thing around is a particular kind of monkey. Vexatious at times, volant and vogie at others, a vervet gets in anywhere and delights in teasing cats and dogs alike. As the upstart monkey in this business I can think of no better mascot. And so let’s launch our vicenary cycle, our verist varlet, the Vivid Vervet!

Before I launch into the tongue-twisting topic of t-series terminology I would like to say a few thank-you’s.

Saucy, now officially known as Ubuntu 13.10, is a wonderful achievement by a very large and diverse collection of teams and individuals. Each of us is motivated by something different – in fact, we might have very different visions of what the ideal desktop looks like or what the default set of applications should be. But we manage, in the spirit of ubuntu, to work together to make something wonderful like 13.10, which serves the needs and goals of a very large number of people and communities.

This release had plenty to put it under pressure. It’s the preview-LTS, in a sense, which means we need to get a lot of the “big rocks” in. That means a willingness to lead change, and doing so in such a complex inter-dependent environment is very challenging. I would like to thank all the teams who have done their part to shape that change into something that worked for them. To the KDE, XFCE and GNOME-focused communities in Ubuntu, thank you for bringing your perspective and I’m delighted that you are all making such great releases now as well.

13.10 is a very special release for me because I think we are leading the GNU/Linux world into a very important arena, which is mobile personal computing. Canonical has its fair share of competitors and detractors who love to undermine the work it does, but I think that wiser heads appreciate the magnitude of the effort required to break this ice, and the extent to which it has taken courage and grace under fire for this team to deliver such a sharp 1.0 of the mobile experience for Ubuntu. It is a reflection of the widespread interest and enthusiasm for that work that we had such diverse participation in the core applications that make up this 1.0 of Ubuntu-for-phones. Multiple teams formed spontaneously to explore new territory: a new mobile design paradigm, new SDK, new visual language. And wow, you guys pulled it off beautifully.  So many contributions from a fresh free software community is testament to the work and style of guys like Michael Hall, who epitomise collaborative development and friendly exchanges of views, motivating guys like me and a hundred others to make sure we deliver something great.

Designers, shell engineers, browser engineers, app engineers, people who built app review and publication mechanisms, security experts… I could not be more proud of what these teams have achieved together.

For the technologists there are some very significant milestones, what Rick Spencer calls “the big rocks”, that made it into 13.10.

Image based updates is really important work. For the first time we can guarantee the integrity of a device running Ubuntu, knowing exactly what version of the OS is installed. I can’t wait to get that on my laptop. Yes, it will be a big change, but I can already see how it’s going to make things easier for me. And I’ll still have the full power of raw Ubuntu inside for all my cloud development needs. Well done to the guys who conceived and delivered the mechanism and the machinery that make it possible. Image 100 is, as they say, the cake.

Mir is really important work. When lots of competitors attack a project on purely political grounds, you have to wonder what their agenda is. At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party 😉 [Postscript – I should not have used this label, and apologised in a subsequent post.] And to put all the hue and cry into context: Mir is relevant for approximately 1% of all developers, just those who think about shell development. Every app developer will consume Mir through their toolkit. By contrast, those same outraged individuals have NIH’d just about every important piece of the stack they can get their hands on… most notably SystemD, which is hugely invasive and hardly justified. Watch closely to see how competitors to Canonical torture the English language in their efforts to justify how those toolkits should support Windows but not Mir. But we’ll get it done, and it will be amazing.

I can tell you what the agenda of the Mir team is: speed, quality, reliability, efficiency. That’s it. From what I’ve seen on the smartphone, Mir is going to be a huge leap forward for gaming performance, battery life and next-generation display capabilities. So thank you for the many contributions we had to Mir, and to everyone who is testing it in more challenging environments than the smartphone. I’m enjoying it on my laptop and loving the gaming benchmarks for native Mir. So to that team, and the broader community who are helping test and refine Mir, thank you.

App containers and the associated mechanisms for application update are hugely important too. We now have a much better way for app developers to deliver an app to Ubuntu users, giving them much more control of the libraries and dependencies and updates that will affect them. We also make it much easier for developers to deliver newer versions of their app on older versions of the OS. I know that’s a top ask for many of our users, and we’ve done it for the smartphone. It will be available for the desktop as soon as we converge the two. I love seeing those app updates flow onto the phone, and I’m told the developer review and publication process is really sweet. Well done.

So yes, I am very proud to be, as the Register puts it, the Ubuntu Daddy. My affection for this community in its broadest sense – from Mint to our cloud developer audience, and all the teams at Canonical and in each of our derivatives, is very tangible today. It’s had its ups and downs this cycle 🙂 but I feel we’ve pulled together. What the Register misses in that description is that so many of you are in fact the progenitors of Ubuntu’s goodness. Its a privilege to provide the conduit, but the generosity of all of you in making something wonderful to share through that conduit is what’s most touching.

So – saucy is in the can, and it’s time to turn our tactical talk to 14.04, which will of course be an LTS.

As such, our focus is going to be on performance, refinement, maintainability, technical debt. It would be entirely appropriate for us to make conservative choices in this upcoming vUDS, so please join us in those discussions as we shape 14.04 as a platform for long-term deployments on the PC and the cloud and the server. In particular, we will be providing OpenStack I, J and K on 14.04 for LTS deployments, so we need to make sure we meet the needs of that community for a solid core. On the desktop, 13.10 has benefited greatly from the fact that it has a team just focused on improving quality. We’ll do the same again and more for 14.04. On the mobile front, we’re going to keep racing forward, the platform is too new for an LTS and we’re excited to complete the journey of full convergence. We won’t get there in one cycle but given the pace of improvement of the phone and tablet in the last month I think it’s going to be a fantastic cycle there.

vUDS is where those core decisions are made. We’ve broken new ground on public consultation and discussion: anyone can participate by voice or video, discussions are fast and open-minded, results are communicated in the same week. It’s worth taking time out from work, play or sleep to bring your perspective to bear on what 14.04 needs to deliver, and what commitments you want to make to achieve that.

But… what will we call it? As TS Eliot put it, “the naming of cats is a difficult matter, it isn’t just one of your everyday games…”

It’s no trifling matter to tap the well of tempting tautological taxa in search of just the right mascot for something like 14.04. So many bad options! There’s the “tasty tailless tenrec” (wait for the letters from PETA), the “toxic taipan” (hello again my Aussie mates), and the  “tantric tarantula” (hold very still…). The “trigamous tayra” (bendy!) and “trippy tegu” just won’t do. We need something a bit more serious than the “twinkle-toed tamarin”, something a bit more transcendent than the the “toric terrapin”, a bit more thematic than the “thermic tamandua” (though I do like the reference to HEAT, something new in the OpenStack world) and a bit cooler than the “thermobaric thornytail”. There are quite a few good options too… Consider the “timely testudo”, that famous winning tortoise, or the “tenacious tapir” who always gets the job done, those might do. And who could resist the “telegenic tamias” other than, perhaps, the developers who have to type “telegenic” every time they make an upload!

Themes therianthropic seem a touch tub-thumping, and tigers Tasman a touch extinct. That tarsier is tactile but titchy too, the toad a bit witchy the the tree shrew, too-too. For a tip-top release nothing tepid will do.

So our titular totem, our tamper-proof taboo, our tranquil memento of mission and dues, our topical target of both cry and hue, the name for our LTS thoughtful and true: I give you, as Seuss would, with hullabaloo, the temperate and thrifty, the talented and tactful but ultimately, and tellingly, trusty tahr.

The tahr navigates Himalayan heights, shaggily suited, sure-footed and steady. A small tourist tahr population lived on my favourite Table Mountain, and while they’ve made way for indigenous animals, for a long time they symbolised hardiness and fearlessness, perched as they were against the cliffs. We’ll do well together. Let’s get cracking!

Congratulations and thanks to the entire extended Ubuntu community for today’s release of Ubuntu 13.04, the Raring Ringtail. Feedback over the past few months on raring has been fantastic – pretty much universal recognition of the performance and quality initiatives Rick’s team have led and which have been embraced across the platform and the community.

In the work to underpin a rolling release, we made huge strides in automated quality assessment and performance testing. From here on out, I’m going to treat the cutting edge of Ubuntu as a rolling release, because the team have done such an amazing job of making daily quality a reality. That’s a value that we have all adopted, and the project is much better off for it.

Slipping the phrase ‘ring ring’ into the codename of 13.04 was, frankly, a triumph of linguistic engineering. And I thought I might quit on a high… For a while, there was the distinct possibility that Rick’s Rolling Release Rodeo would absolve me of the  twice-annual rite of composition that goes into the naming of a new release. That, together with the extent of my travels these past few months, have left me a little short in the research department. I usually spend a few weekend afternoons doodling with a dictionary (it’s actually quite a blast, and I recently had the pleasure of actually knowing what some ponce was talking about when they described something as ‘rugose’).

So today I find myself somewhat short in the naming department, which is to say, I have a name, but not the soliloquy that usually goes with it!

Which is why, upon not very deep reflection, I would like to introduce you to our mascot for the next six months, the saucy salamander.

The salamander is one of nature’s most magical creatures; they are a strong indicator of a pristine environment, which is a fitting way to describe the new world emerging around Ubuntu Touch – new applications, a new SDK, a gorgeous clean interface. You’ll find salamanders swimming in clear, clean upstreams – which is exactly what’s forming around Ubuntu’s mobile ecosystem. It’s a way of saying ‘thank you’ to the tremendous community that has joined the effort to create a single unified experience from phone to PC, with tons of crisp and stylish core apps made by people from all over the world who want to build something fast, fresh and free. And we’re saucy too – life’s too short to be stodgy or stilted. Our work is our play – we make amazing things for a huge audience, we find space for pretty much every flavour of interface and do it with style.

Happy release day everyone! Here’s to a super saucy cycle.

It’s a perennial pleasure to pick pertinent and/or pithy placeholder names for Ubuntu releases. At least, I like to think of them as pertinent and/or pithy. I’ve had diverse feedback, shall we say. Nevertheless, it’s now a tradition, and it’s a pressing priority as we approach the release of Oneiric.

So, what will be our mascot for 12.04 LTS?

The letter P is pretty perfect. It’s also plentiful – my inbox has been rather full of suggestions – and we have options ranging from pacific to purposeful, via puckish and prudent. We’ll steer clear of the posh and the poncey, much as some would revel in the Portentious Palomino or the Principled Paca, those aren’t the winning names. Having spent the last six months elucidating the meaning of “oneiric” I think it might also be worth skipping the parenthetical or paralogical options too; so sadly I had to exclude the Perspicacious Panda and Porangi Packhorse (though being an LTS, that Packhorse was a near thing).

Being generally of a cheerful nature, I thought we’d avoid the Predatory Panther and Primeval Possum. Neither sounds like great company for a seven year journey, really. Same goes for the Peccable Peccary, Pawky Python and Perfidious Puku. So many bullets to dodge round here!

We’re looking for something phonetic, something plausible and something peaceful too. We’ll avoid the petulant, the pestilent, the phlegmy (phooey!), the parochial, the palliative and the psychotic. We’re aiming for mildly prophetic, and somewhat potent, without wanting to be all pedantic and particular. Phew.

So, what might work?

There are lots of lovely candidates. I have a fondness for phat. The Phat Platypus has a can-do kind of ring to it, but I don’t think it’ll fly.

I also like punchy and perky (the Perky Penguin is a nice nostalgic option) and persistent (better than permanent, peerless or penultimate) and playful and plucky and poised. Others like prescient and peaceable and pervasive (!) and pivotal. Pukka rings a nice old-world bell, but it’s possibly pejorative.

As you can see, it’s been something of a challenge to get this right.

Let’s ask the question differently – what are we trying to convey? 12.04 is an LTS. So we want it to be tough and long-lasting, reliable, solid as a rock and well defended. It’s also going to be the face of Ubuntu for large deployments for a long time, so we want it to have no loose ends, we want it to be coherent, neat.

We’ve told the story of the cloud in previous releases, and that comes to fruition in 12.04 with the first LTS that supports both the cloud guest, and cloud infrastructure, across ARM and x86 architectures. We’ve also told the story of Unity in previous releases, and that comes to fruition in a fast, lean interface that works well across clients both thick and thin. 12.04 is going to be a lot more than all that, but for the full reveal, you’ll need to wait till UDS! Nevertheless, we can take reliability, precision, and polish as a given.

Balancing all of those options, I think we have just the right mix in our designated mascot for 12.04 LTS. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Precise Pangolin.

Now, I’ve recently spent a few hours tracking a pangolin through the Kalahari. I can vouch for their precision – there wasn’t an ant hill in the valley that he missed. Their scales are a wonder of detail and quite the fashion statement. I can also vouch for their toughness; pangolin’s regularly survive encounters with lions. All in all, a perfect fit. There’s no sassier character, and no more cheerful digger, anywhere in those desert plains. If you want a plucky partner, the pangolin’s your match. Let’s pack light for a wonderful adventure together. See you in Orlando!