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posted by Woods on Monday April 28 2014, @06:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the why-is-noone-talking-os? dept.

Ars Technica brings us a rather lackluster review of Ubuntu 14.04. Ubuntu 14.04 review: Missing the boat on big changes

Canonical pushed out Ubuntu 14.04 last week. This release is the first Ubuntu Long Term Support release in two years and will be supported for the next five years.

It feels like, for Canonical at least, this Long Term Support release couldn't have come at a worse time. The company is caught in a transitional phase as it moves from a desktop operating system to a platform that spans devices.

The problem for Canonical is that it's only about 90 percent of the way to a platform-spanning OS, but it just so happens that the company's schedule calls for a Long Term Support release now.

Long Term Support releases are typically more conservative and focus on stability and long-term maintenance rather than experimental or flashy new features. Things that are 90 percent done don't make it into LTS releases. And, unfortunately for Canonical, most of its foundation-shaking changes to Ubuntu are currently only about 90 percent done and thus not part of this release.

It's an unfortunate time for a release in the cycle; Do you think they should have held off and waited for xMir? Or will they finally pry Microsoft Bob away from your cold dead hands?

 
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  • (Score: 1) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday April 29 2014, @04:48AM

    by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Tuesday April 29 2014, @04:48AM (#37520)

    The sad thing is that Ubuntu was really on the verge of being a great desktop O/S. From roughly 6.10 through 10.10 I thought it was the best out there, at least for my purposes. There are probably a lot of reasons they went bad, in part it was the developing trend of seemingly the whole open source community being intent on continually discarding what works, what we like and what we use in pursuing the pied piper of mobile devices. Gnome had screwed up, it was probably necessary for Ubuntu to drop them, but Unity was certainly not the immediate answer. Maybe the Ubuntu phone will be a great thing if they ever succeed with it, but they lost a great chance to make a mark in desktop computing.
    Or maybe they just wanted to one up Microsoft. If MS could make an unusable O/S, by god they could too!