30 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 55.4 ms ] thread
Stupid name like all Android/Ubuntu releases.
Really? I liked this one, it's obscure (never even heard of the animal) but kinda Star Trek'y and easy to pronounce.
...or you could call it 14.04 (and Android 2.3, 4.1 etc etc) if you don't like easy to remember words. Let's face it 'Mavericks' and 'Blue' aren't much better.
It's gonna take a while, but I really woder what comes after Z.
they'll start with dessert names?
They could use other languages whose alphabets don't end at Z. Åksjuk Ångström, perhaps.
Nice adjective for the LTS.
I think "Tim Tebow" would have been an awesome name.
Now all I can think of is a guy named Jimbob wanting to get a set of four tahrs for his truck.
Targ would've been better, IMO. ;)
"At least we know now who belongs to the Open Source Tea Party"

Ouch! Shuttleworth doesn't shy away from controversy. It's not a bad thing to be polarizing in a quickly-moving industry, but that comment seemed pretty harsh.

Maybe he think's he don't have much to lose by stating his opinion? I can only think how hard must be to work with the open source community. Not saying Canonical is good or bad, or that he's right or wrong.

- Regular users, moms and dads won't care about what him, Stallman or Torvalds says.

- Usual trolls and circlejerkers will behave the same, but with free food. So basically free marketing, right?

- People who care will know where they stand, if they dislike they can just change distro silently like most people. If not, they might buy an Ubuntu phone. Just regular business, analyzing what's good and what's bad in the product.

It is funny that he should make such a comment. They are the ones who began the attacks on Wayland while launching Mir.
I don't see why he's helping incite the bizarre religious wars that have started up lately about Mir vs Wayland, Systemd vs Everyone, Unity vs Everyone.

The great thing about a Linux system is we can choose the components we want. If he wants Mir and Unity and Upstart in his distro then great.If I want Wayland and Systemd and Gnome 3 then I can go with that.

The arguments eventually come down to technical merit. Whichever one is best will eventually be used. If not, the competition leads us to an arms race of features. Everyone wins.

Nobody does well by there being no competition though, down that road lies IE6.

Agreed, although for those who already see one as having 'won' on technical merit, it might make sense for them to try and shift development to the future of that project, rather than continue down a route that they believe will always be inferior.
They're going to bring Mir/XMir in for an LTS? That seems to be risky to me. These large Canonical-backed projects seem to have a whole lot of rough spots on launch day. upstart and Unity both were very buggy initially.

Or is this going to be one of those cases where they come out aiming for LTS, but end up pushing it back to the next release?

Rick Spencer said last night at a release party that he expected that 14.10 would have Mir, since otherwise his team would have to support early-2014 Mir for years, which he didn't want to do because it's still improving so quickly.

If I understand correctly, Mir is currently used only on the phone edition.

Did you mean 14.10 would have XOrg, or am I reading this way wrong?
I mean that Mir will not replace X until 14.10, so the 14.04 LTS release will still use X by default. A lot of people have been worried about Mir being launched as the default desktop display server in an LTS, and when I spoke about it with Rick, he said that he wasn't planning for Mir to be the default in 14.04, and the reason why was that it was changing rapidly still, and the Mir they could put in 14.04 would likely not have stopped changing rapidly yet, but would have to be supported in a bugfix-only fashion for years after 2014.
They should have gone with Tapir. That way we could have made "Calvin"-type peeing stickers that spanned the entire back window of our pickup trucks.

Tapirs - The Super Soakers of the animal kingdom.

So what happens after when they reach Z?
They go to three letters, such as Annoyingly Angry Antelope...
Although LTS releases are more reliable and better supported, I find the other releases to be more exciting. Hence I will probably wait for 'Ubuntu 14.10 Unitarian Unicorn' or whatever it is called.
Dear Mark Shuttleworth,

It's not too late to switch the name to Titillating Tit.

I was rather hoping for Tumultuous Tarsier.