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. Â 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!