Saturday, October 25, 2014

Ubuntu 14.10 - Utopic Unicorn Review

If you have 14.04 LTS installed and upgrading to 14.10, there is not much to notice except the performance and power management improvements which are under the hood. Ubuntu 14.10's blueprint has only 35 items while 14.04's blueprint had 117 items. It seems Ubuntu didn't want to leave a bad taste in the minds of users on its 10th birthday. It has become a new norm in GNU/Linux community to militantly oppose any major change.

Things that are new include, improved support for hardware, power management, SSD optimization using TRIM, better Btrfs support, all of which are due to the Linux kernel update to version 3.16

Now let us see what Ubuntu 14.10 - Utopic Unicorn can deliver to end users against other OSes.

Ubuntu is a trusted name among GNU/Linux users. It is well known for its ease of use, good support and stability. Also even after 10 years, the release cycles of Ubuntu went like clock works and the users are provided with latest and greatest software!

Compared with proprietary operating systems, Ubuntu stands top in addressing security issues. It supports most of the latest hardware components like sound card, USB devices, laptop hot keys etc. Most of the proprietary OSes require you to install drives separately.

The centralized software management (which is common to all GNU/Linux platforms) is also a key in maintaining the system. Everything from your core operating system to browser will be updated in one shot!

So this is not a compelling update for 14.10 LTS users. But if you think there can be any thing new in 15.04 or 15.10 or even 16.04, you need to upgrade to 14.10 now. Else you have to wait till 16.10 to get any thing new that may come in between like GNOME 3.14 or Unity 8 or Mir.
But for users of other proprietary OSes, this is a compelling release. People are waiting for a newer version of windows just for a start menu button lately! But with Ubuntu you have various choices of desktop environments which can meet our taste. Also you don't have any attached guilt of pirating the OS or wasting your money on a disk of 0s and 1s :)

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