Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is the first long-term support release with support for the new “arm64” architecture for 64-bit ARM systems, as well as the “ppc64el” architecture for little-endian 64-bit POWER systems. This release also includes several subtle but welcome improvements to Unity, AppArmor, and a host of other great software.
Is it just me, or do releases of major Linux distributions simply not create much excitement anymore? I remember a time when these releases were hotly anticipated and much debated. These days, they go by and nobody really seems to care. Is this a reflection of shifting focus in the industry – towards mobile – or because the interest in desktop Linux in general has waned considerably?
ISTM that your observation is correct, but I can think of two reasons for that.
1) People just don’t care about the desktop as much. All the excitement is over the next iOS, Android, or WP release.
2) Things have sort of stabilized on the desktop. Back in the day, there were big changes going on in KDE and GNOME. These days, those are a lot more mature and changes are incremental–nothing to get excited about.
The point two should be looked upon with a grain of salt: things have not stabilized on desktop, this is calmness before the storm.
Back four years ago, all biggest desktop Linux proponents began to agree that Linux’s desktop foundations was rusting and clanking badly: awkward init system, lack of unified logging infrastructure, file systems without fancy features by default, a whole inadequate display system that is not aging well, lack of decent sound server that supported nice stuff plug-and-play, network software too command line oriented, wireless infrastructure that looked like a patch work, terrible device recognition schemes, near non-existant bluetooth support, terrible power management, lack of decent suspend/hibernate infrastructure…
All hot Linux development efforts by now is going on background stuff: pulseaudio, wayland/mir, glamour/dri3, gallium3d, systemd, scheduler improvements, btrfs, NetworkManager, BlueZ…
Linux desktop advanced greatly in the past few years. The sole thing preventing radical changes on the “visual” side of the things is that no one wants to invest effort developing for X11 anymore, everyone is waiting the new display server. But in the back-end, the Linux desktop from four years ago is near unrecognizable by now.
Strongly disagree: my Linux desktop is fairly out-of-date (and out of support) being released about 1.5 years ago, but still have some of this “new” stuff. I don’t feel a need the need to reserve half a day for an upgrade because there is nothing exciting to motivate me.
From a “desktop” point of view, the Linux desktop peaked at GNOME 2.30, from there it is going downhill. Some more polishing on the GNOME 3 or Unity turds is irrelevant, they will continue sucking, while MATE, Cinnamon, Xfce are still weaker compared with GNOME 2.30.
But the desktop is not that important, it is only the place where you launch your applications. Applications are important and they are the driving us into the upgrade cycle. I will feel the urge to upgrade when there will be the time to upgrade one of the apps my life depend on it (in my case that would be image editing apps).
If it is working fine for you and has all features that makes you productive, no urge to upgrade.
Hundreds of millions of Windows XP users agree with you, so you are not alone.
My point is: there is no way to create exciting new stuff when your whole environment is build upon a infrastructure stagnated for a entire decade or more. That means “no nice applications for you”. Stabilization is good, but too much starves innovation and makes you lag behind eventually.
Actually not, since the most important apps are cross-platform, the infrastructure (operating system, desktop environment , init system) have no influence or at most a minor influence.
Years ago it was exciting to get a new version of your desktop as it added useful features that were badly needed. These days is all reinventing the wheel and changing for change’s sake.
You post was spot on! I feel exactly the same. I run FreeBSD with JWM (a classic window manager), and sometimes Gnome 2.x. But I hardly see the desktop because I run actual applications I need. I simply need a menu to launch my apps. JWM does that perfectly and stays out of my way the rest of the time. Just the way I like it.
MATE is literally GNOME 2 with more patches and a green theme. If you dislike MATE, then you just have rose colored glasses about GNOME 2.
… and the fact that Linux as a general user Desktop operating system is STILL not up to say the standard of Windows XP which is EOL, says it all!
Really ? You haven’t used Desktop Linux in a long time have you.
I assume you should have no issues giving concrete examples:
Say, by comparing the latest release of Fedora / SUSE / Ubuntu to Windows 7 (and XP) and pointing the apparent deficiencies in Linux.
I’ll start:
Linux still suffers from less than ideal hardware support. Some types of hardware may produce less than ideal results. However, the situation has improved a great deal in the last 10 years or so. *
Care to continue? **
– Gilboa
* I actually run a startup that uses Linux for 90% of our desktops, laptops and servers.
** If you can one can only assume that you yet-another-Internet troll.
Edited 2014-04-18 09:44 UTC
I’d lean towards number 2, as I’m not even seeing huge excitement in the phone and tablet space. Really, why should there be? The general state of tech is mature and for the moment there’s nothing controversial or revolutionary on offer for the end user. Take it as a good sign, boring tends to go hand in hand with smoothly operating.
http://www.nku.edu/~issues/internet_marketing/newwebpage1.html
Perhaps one could say, the steeper the curve, the more interesting?
And Linux distros don’t do anything to change that!!
Which is the big or innovative feature of Ubuntu 14.04? Why do We have to try it?
I love Linux as a server OS, lots of interesting things are happening there (containers, btrfs, ecc)… but Linux as a desktop OS is absolutely irrelevant.
The problem is how things hardly change.
I got to know GNU/Linux at the university with Slackware 2.0 back in Summer of 1995.
Before that I already had experience with GUIs in Amiga, Atari, Acorn, PC (Geos, Deskview, Windows, OS/2), UNIX (twm, Motif).
GNU/Linux had the novelty of trying out several window managers and desktop environments.
But eventually one gets bored of having the same type of issues with hardware as back in 1995, from using window managers that fade away as no one cares to update them to the next set of breaking changes, and we move on.
What do you mean by “irrelevant”? Do you mean that it’s not important for YOU? To me it is, I still do some work on my local laptop 🙂
I you mean that there is not much going on on the desktop, I think you are mistaken. There’s a lot going on in Windowmanagers’/DE Land 🙂 Think of all the nice tiling WMs (i3wm, herbst, awesome, dwm etc.) and on the other side of the spectre all the shiny stuff like Gnome3, KDE, razorQT, Enlightment and so on 🙂
If you mean that many people only use their PC to fire up a browser, and that webdesign is now where it’s happening, then you are right! 🙂
Who cares? I just need it to work without issues, which it does.
To you perhaps but that is not to say that it is irrelevant for everyone.
Well, From my perspective the great feature of 14.04 for desktops is Docker support. I’ve switched over to Docker to test various multi server configurations. Having another distro as big as Ubuntu supporting it out of the box enlarges the industry around it. It will get more support, and that will help me, even though I don’t use ubuntu.
But, I’d agree for someone not using it as a workstation or server os, the changes are pretty incremental. BTRFS is maturing, but there aren’t gui tools around it to help desktop users do crazy awesome stuff with it yet. Mir isn’t enabled by default, and Unity isn’t QT’d yet. When those features are enabled, that will be a big release.
At the same time, Kubuntu 14.04 LTS has been released, featuring:
– The latest KDE Applications and Platform, including KDE Connect:
Install KDE Connect on your desktop and your Android mobile phone to integrate the two. Text messages will appear on your screen, files can be shared, your music can be controlled from your phone and your music will be turned off when you receive a phone call.
– Commercial Support.
– Mozilla Firefox 28 as default web browser.
– All new Driver Manager.
More changes (and screenshots 🙂 ) can be seen in http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-14.04
Edited 2014-04-17 23:05 UTC
I’m not a KDE user for many reasons, but I may have to spin up a Kubuntu VM just to try this out. It sounds like the kind of convergence that Microsoft is still taking baby steps towards.
They’ve been doing the same move since the start of the switch to Qt5.
The UIs are being rewritten in QML, which means that the core logic is then separate.
Apps then have one QML interface per device category: one for desktop, one for mobile, one for tablets.
The app is then just like the new MS model: one binary can serve all interfaces without compromising.
I’m surprised it isn’t called “KDE Konnect”
Is this one of the last traditional kubuntu releases? KDE isn’t going to support Mir. So … I think Kubuntu might turn into kdebuntu or something after xorg is replaced by Mir.
https://blogs.kde.org/2013/06/26/kubuntu-wont-be-switching-mir-or-xm…
Is this a reflection of shifting focus in the industry – towards mobile – or because the interest in desktop Linux in general has waned considerably?
Our attention atrophies a bit as we’re perpetually in this “waiting” state for next-generation technology to arrive. For example, seems like we’re *ALWAYS* waiting for Wayland (and now Mir) to land, and the first desktop environment to leverage its technologies…and the first distro to create that picture-perfect, seamless (no console/screen resolution/state changes during boot-up or shut-down; fast & highly integrated power management + hibernation + etc.)… will peak the interest of those who use Linux desktops. I just fear there are too many years ahead of us before wayland/mir (and distros w/ polished DEs around that tech) will land. Lord knows where the competition will be.
I’ve been waiting for Ubuntu 14.04 since 2011, and I’m pleased that it’s out now. I had kept several systems on 10.04, because I didn’t like the state of Unity in 12.04. I still don’t like Unity, but at least it is usable now. 14.04 is a long term support release, and it provides a good stable base for many distributions and applications that will be supported for many years to come.
Overall, it seems that OSNews and similar tech media sites seem to no longer care about the desktop, but it’s where we get most of our work done. I’m not going to do serious engineering or software development on iOS or Android. The desktop is a mature platform, but the newer packages in 14.04 provide countless little improvements, new features, and stability improvements over older versions. You may not be excited about a new long term support desktop/server Linux release, but it sure is long awaited and important to me, much more so than a new Windows Phone version or Jolla update or Android point release.
I’m sure that others who use Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distributions for actual work with long-term deployments will care about the new release too.
People prefer rolling release distributions such as Arch… Why do we have to wait for Ubuntu to come out with a new version, so that we can upgrade to get the latest things we need… why can’t they just push out the latest versions of everything when they feel they are ready?
I’ve not used a Linux OS in a while (apart from raspbian), so maybe I’m out of touch…
You’re very correct that people who want the latest and greatest prefer Arch. That’s why I and many of my friends and colleagues also run Arch/Manjaro. However, Mint and Ubuntu users likely outnumber Arch users by almost an order of magnitude.
The problem with rolling releases is that you can’t really lock down on a standard working configuration unless you sacrifice security updates (which is generally unacceptable). I like to have stable machines whose configurations don’t change significantly for a few years. When reinstalling the OS or setting up a new production machine, I like to run a standardized configuration that I know to be working and know how to configure.
The real problem at the core of this is that we still, to this day, don’t have a standard for packaging software in Linux land that is separate from the system. If I want the latest version of Firefox on an Ubuntu system I can either a: find a PPA that may or may not continue to be updated and may be of dubious quality or b: download the official Firefox like I would on Windows or Mac. Problem? Doing this requires the end user to extract the archive, stick it somewhere, then run it from there. It doesn’t appear in menus. It doesn’t show up in the launcher, nor does it register as a program capable of opening files, unless you register it as an end user. That’s fine for technical or power users, but way beyond what an average user knows how to do. Compare it on Windows: double click the setup file, install, run. Mac: Drag the application to your Applications folder, run.
How we can have so many people supposedly working on desktop useability and not have settled on a standard for something so simple boggles the mind. Let’s not even get started on installing third-party drivers if they aren’t packaged.
I’m not suggesting dumbing anything down, just settle on one of the many zero-install standards out there and use it. That’d at least solve the problem for application software.
This won’t solve anything. Unifying only the package manager can’t solve all the different requirements distros have. Some lean toward stability with older version of software maintained with security fixes, some other are at the bleeding edge, releasing software as they come out. Some add a few patches to make software work better in their environment. Something like what systemd is doing by unifying some basic Linux infrastructure is a much better deal in my opinion.
Also, not being able or being somewhat laborious to install software directly from the developer (or random websites…) is a consequence of repositories doing a better work at it. Safer*, faster, consistent, integrated… sounds like an appstore. Installing driver is an even worse idea since you want to make sure it works with your distro, and pointless since almost 99.99% of the drivers you will ever gonna need are bundled with the kernel. Any remaining third party driver MUST be packaged by the distro for sanity sake. If the driver is not bundled with the kernel, nor provided by your distro as a third party package and you are not a linux guru, you may need to reconsider the hardware you bought or use another OS. You don’t hunt for drivers in Linux like you do in Windows.
I do agree that the current situation where the user is stuck with the same major version of Firefox or LibreOffice for a long time when using a popular distro like Ubuntu sucks… But I’m afraid the only real way to fix that is by making Linux more popular and developers more engaged with distros.
The latest version of Firefox is not a good program with which to make your point, because it’s quickly updated every time a new version is released. It’s been like that for a while now. On the other hand a program like Handbrake can be more difficult to keep current.
I doubt that differences in package management are the cause of the small Linux desktop market share. For the user, these differences are small. Also, the big consumer distros have GUI wrappers for the package managers, so Joe Sixpack doesn’t even have to open a terminal, it’s just point & click.
And installing in any Linux distro is much easier than in Windows or OSX. Compare: in Windows I have to google to find the .exe of the program (say: firefox). I have to download it and have to trust that this .exe thing will behave well, that it’s not malware. Then I click it and hope everything goes well. Every program installs in a different wau. Updating all programs is a complex job. Removing programs in a clean way is not possible.
In Linux I open a terminal and type apt-get update && upgrade or pacman -Syu and I’m done. No hunting for programs, no trust problems etc.
It is for a good reason that Android, iOS and now also OSX and Windows are copying the “app store” concept from Linux: one place for all software, centralized updates.
So, whatever the reasons of the small Linux desktop market share are, packagement is not one of them. Right?
Edited 2014-04-18 12:32 UTC
Wait … is it that bad on ubuntu? I thought distributing a .deb should work, right? Like on Fedora and cent, you can just install a rpm simply and easily. Back when Opera was distributing linux versions regularly, it was that simple with fedora. Just download and run the rpm, program installed complete with menu items as you’d expect.
FYI, the Linux Standard Base ( for what its worth) selected RPMS as the standard.
Yes, it’s just that simple and it’s not like it’s hard to make rpm’s and deb’s either. There’s plenty of tools available that makes it a breeze.
You’re confusing “people” with “me and some people I know”.
+1, and the same applies to comments above about nobody caring about desktop OSes.
Some people prefer them… Myself and the people I know, don’t.
Plenty of pros and cons either way one chooses to go… I’d take more care with broad statements like that.
Just because you wish something to be true, it does not make it so.
The “problem” is that software is changing all the time. I mean both the OS and the applications. How to solve this? Either by rolling (meaning constant upgrades and minor breakages from time to time) or by fixed releases (meaning jump, freeze, jump, freeze and so on: bigger jumps, less frequent but more serious breakages). Pick your poison 🙂 You can’t say one solution is always better than the other. And I say this as an archlinux user myself.
Is it just me, or do new here on Osnews simply not create much excitement anymore?
We can remember years ago when you had long articles. Now what you do is a short “copy paste” (citation) , and then one or two sentences of your own saying your subjective opinion…or even less, just asking something on your own, that in most cases has just rhetoric value.
Where are the article of the past that had also technical information ? Longer aritcles with techincal insight?
What you do is simply doing a copy-paste , then writing a question or short statement, to provoce the users to comment it (and to create the content by themselves).
I think it’s a cheap strategy.
Edited 2014-04-18 01:48 UTC
Yes, and yes.
And it’s also Linux Release Burnout. Ubuntu alone has has 20 releases in under ten years. And how many other distros have regular releases? After about a thousand release announcements… yawn.
But there have only been 4 LTS releases.
It’s not necessarily Linux that is unexciting, it’s the announcements. There have been ~many~ more than four Ubuntu release headline stories headline at OS News. The most recent was only 6 months ago.
I don’t blame OS News for making a story out of the announcements – it’s what this site is for. But you can’t blame people for feeling burned out, or failing to jump up and down with each release.
Canonical (IMHO) is these days all about making money. I know that SUSE and RedHat are the same but their paid for products are differentiated by branding from the ‘free, you are on your own’ versions.
Canonical do their own thing and really contribute very little back (please correct me here) to the mainstream Linux movement. They are (as it appears to me) on a course to be just like MS with one UI for everything.
The problems that Metro has had on the desktop should have been a clear warning that one UI is not the answer.
I said bye-bye to Ubuntu several years ago. I have tried releases since but found them to be very unstable/unusable. At the moment, I doubt that I will have any inclination to test this one out. A case of Meh, so-what.
Great timing for me. I just switched from Windows 8 to Ubuntu 14.04 last week. I installed the beta at that time as I could see from the naming convention that the full version would release this month. I did not have to wait long.
I at least was pretty excited. The fact that many Ubuntu features seem to have matured to where they cause little controversy is exactly what makes it exciting for me. I was really happy to see that this was an LTS as well. I will be using this machine in a work environment.
Or maybe it is that LTS releases have never been exciting?
You won’t (or shouldn’t) have any major new feature in a LTS, but rather stabilization of features introduced in the previous non LTS release. Not much new stuff to talk about.
I mean, the single most noticeable differences compared to 13.10 are probably antialiased corners and boderless windows.
Then you also have new app versions, but every Ubuntu-related tech blog around has already been talking about those months ago explaining how you could add them to 13.10 through PPAs.
It seems to me that not much changes for the end user each release it takes a few releases before things actually change that much. They are more like glorified update bundling. To be fair I don’t use linux much or often simple because of lacking of gaming support. I am only actually watching steamOS with interest inhopes that it will take off creating gaming on linux. If that happens I would start looking at linux distros again with more interest.
Most people here seem to be debating whether we shoudl be excited about this release announcement. I actually downloaded Ubuntu yesterday and gave it a try. It is a big improvement over the past few releases. The Unity desktop is much faster and a bit more flexible. The system feels fluid and consistent. I’ve run into a few minor problems with the default video player (Totem) but everything else has worked well for me so far.
My only disappointment, really, with this release is the dropping of Ubuntu One. The One service was a convenient way to sync documents and photos on my desktop/laptop/phone. Not a big deal as there are other sync services, but the lack of One is one of my few gripes.
I really like what they have done with the Dash. It is faster and easier to customize now.
My main disappointment, aside from Ubuntu one being gone, is that for some reason nvidia-prime is broken for my card (820M) in 14.04 (works in 13.10).
Guess I’ll have to hold off a week or so before upgrading again.
Edited 2014-04-18 14:43 UTC
I’ll agree that I’m just not that into the state of linux development anymore. It’s reached the point where it can easily just install and get out of my way to let the applications shine. And really, even applications themselves tend to be crossplatform. Most stuff worth getting hyped about shows up all all three major platforms.
Similar thing with the mobile platforms for me as well. Android’s reached a point where new releases just aren’t that interesting. It’s more tweaks and new features I don’t care about than anything to really grab my attention.
Linux desktop lost grounds when GNOME 3 was born and when Unity was Canonical little baby. Microsoft of course was striving to get back on track with Windows 7, and they did. What they must have laughed a lot was how imbecile GNOME and Unity were – it actually helped Microsoft to get back lots of users who were doing fine with GNOME 2. Somehow Microsoft managed to shoot in the foot again with Windows 8.
A lot of things changed, so it’s not like 5 or 10 years anymore. Operating systems will be irrelevant soon. What will keep making the difference are applications. It’s always been applications that people will be interested.
As for mobile, I have never been interested. I think most people also don’t care a bit what they are running on these devices.
Perhaps when Unity get more customizable, with ability to have the dock at the bottom, things will start to get hot between OSX and Ubuntu.
stems from years of waiting for Linux to become USEFUL for me as a desktop OS, and it never actually appearing. For me the craptastic freetype “let’s kern text like a rhesis monkey on crack”, complete lack of actual interface queues as to what’s taking so long or that it even acknowledged my actions (see the double click on something or click on a menu item, and NOTHING happens — not even a cursor change, so five minutes of disk chugging later 8 copies of Firefox open simultaneously as I didn’t think it noticed my clicking), and file managers that to be frank apart from long filename support aren’t even as capable as the one that came with Windows 3.1… (thunar being the best of the lot — and that’s not a good thing)
… and of course that’s not even talking how even allegedly “supported” hardware (particularly video and audio) are pathetically crippled and an absolute mess of different interfaces…
There’s a reason I say *nix is for servers, Windows is for desktops — you try to use them the other way around and you very quickly find just how badly that square peg fits in the round hole.
The people who DO use Linux as a desktop OS daily I’m stuck going “HOW?!?” — and it’s not like I’m command line shy sitting here still writing 8088 machine language and TP7 code…
But then, what do I know? I still consider Windows 98 to have been the PINNACLE of desktop UI design — and everything since to be a massive step BACKWARDS.
Though I will say most Linux desktops do a very good job of LOOKING feature complete… then you try to do the simplest of things and find that it either can’t do it, or you have to dick around on the command line to even get the internal speakers to mute when you plug in headphones.
If I wanted to waste half my day dicking around on the command line for uselessly vague and ridiculously poorly documented configuration files and utilities, I’d drag out my Trash-80 Model 16 and play around with Xenix again.
All in all the experience is lacking, and seems bound and determined to STAY lacking as the developers screw around with goofy BS like animations, opacities, and a host of other “gee ain’t it neat” nonsense instead of addressing actual problems.
Though that’s Open Sores in a nutshell — if it’s not cool, trendy, or worth it to someone with enough $$$ to set a bounty, don’t plan on it EVER being fixed; at least not until it blows up in everybody’s face — see “heartbleed”.
Edited 2014-04-19 11:55 UTC
You might want to seek professional help for that ailment.
Uh….I’m afraid what we’re looking at here is not a failure of the OS. It’s more of a PEBKAC thing.
Why are you talking about Windows 8 all of a sudden?
I have Linux on the desktop for over 10 years and it works for me.
Hardware support is as good as in Windows 8!
But a release is no big deal any more, that is obvious.
Linux users are no longer the young idealists full of too much testosterone and caffeine, we’ve grown-up. I know I have been using Linux for 14 years (my wife has been using it even longer) and I know that many things that used to get me all pumped up don’t grab my attention as much. We used to refer to the the old UNIX users as grey beards. Much of the hair still attached to my head is now grey.
I am excited about the new release, and all the changes. More customization options (like moving the universal menu back to the window if I want). It does a better job of working with my high resolution touchscreen monitor (no fiddling with this release), my high-end printer works better with this release (once again no fiddling), and everything seems to move pretty quickly. Unity has matured and I now use it as my preferred desktop (no longer using Xfce or Openbox; although EvilWM will always have a warm fuzzy spot in my heart). An LTS means more commercial support which is certainly awesome as I am no longer the young idealist that say, “I will only use FOSS!”. And as I look at this, I can easily see how this is going to transition to a phone UI, which I am considering for my next phone.
I have upgraded my main desktop already and in the following week I will upgrade my netbook, my workstation in my lab, and my server; but this will be my single longest post I make about all this.
“Is it just me, or do releases of major Linux distributions simply not create much excitement anymore?”
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20140421
The Ubuntu release day always draws an enormous crowd to this website, but last Thursday was exceptionally busy, breaking many all-time records around here. The main page of DistroWatch received a total of 191,527 visits (an all-time high) of which 63,793 came from unique IP addresses. The Ubuntu page itself got 10,519 visits from unique IP addresses, also an all-time record for an individual distribution page. This was rather surprising considering that the official Ubuntu 14.04 announcement was made unusually late in the day, about 7 hours before midnight GMT (although the Ubuntu page had been updated for 14.04 a lot earlier – at around 04:00 GMT). The overall number of visits on the Ubuntu page on Thursday, Friday and Saturday came to 21,551 page hits from unique IP addresses – also an all-time record
Why would I be enthusiastic about a LTS with Unity?
And yes, I’ve given it a try in 13.10. It’s not only different, but gets in the way. The multiple monitor system may have improved a bit but they haven’t tested it at ALL on a system with more than 2-3 storage partitions