"The Ubuntu developers have announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 1, the first prerelease for this version. Ubuntu 9.04 is codenamed Jaunty Jackalope and is scheduled for official release in April. The initial plans for Jaunty were published in September, prior to the release of Ubuntu 8.10. Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth aims to boost the software experience and make the popular Linux distribution more competitive with Windows and Mac OS X on the desktop. Canonical intends to push the platform into the mainstream by putting its resources into upstream usability improvements. In addition to the ongoing long-term usability enhancement efforts, Canonical and the Ubuntu development community are focusing on several specific technical goals for 9.04, including improving performance and boot time and integrating web services more tightly with the desktop."
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Member since:2005-07-06
The goals for 9.04 will not be defined/finalized till the Ubuntu Developer Conference in December. This is about a month later than usual but so be it.
Given your clearly competitive take on what a distro should deliver to differentiate itself you are not likely to be satisfied with any answers that come oout of the UDC though. Early indicators are that, outside of ARM/netbook support and KDE 4.2 for Kubuntu, most of the goals will be feature refinement rather than new ones. Faster boot time, identify perfomance bottle necks, UI usability enhancements, new version of gnome.... Evolution, not experimentation.
We will know more in about 3 weeks though. Given the late date of the UDC I would expect the change sets to be more conservative than might have been the case if the conf occurred a month earlier.
Member since:2007-02-17
FTA:
Given that Mono 2.0 includes implementations of Windows.forms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET, all of which are claimed by Microsoft as Microsoft proprietary technologies, it looks as though one of the aims of Ubuntu 9.04 is to further embed Microsoft dependencies into Linux GNOME desktops.
Fortunately there will also be KDE 4.2, which is blessedly Mono-less.
Nevertheless, I'm thinking of moving over to Fedora 10 right now, given that Canonical has adopted Mono for its primary offering.
Member since:
2005-11-05
What are the standout features that justify Jaunty Jackalope's existence? What will it give me that I won't also be able to get on Fedora, SuSE or for that matter Debian? I don't mean vague promises from the marketing department but actual code that I'm highly likely to see in the finished product, and in Ubuntu and nowhere else. Without this, it seems to be that speculating about the next Ubuntu (or any other distro) is so much hot air, even though enjoyable.