Canonical has released Ubuntu 14.04, or Trusty Tahr, as this release is nicknamed.

Ubuntu 14.04 is a Long Term Support release, which means Canonical will provide support for 5 years. It also means that this is the first look that more conservative users will get at the direction Ubuntu has been pursuing since the release of 12.04 back in 2012.

As I noted in the <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/28/ubuntu_14_01_final_beta_review/">beta review</a>, Ubuntu LTS releases understandably tend toward the conservative end of the spectrum when it comes to new features. You're not going to see Unity 8 in this release, nor will there be any trace of the Mir graphics stack which Canonical is hoping will one day support both its desktop and mobile offerings.

However, for those who only upgrade when LTS releases come around, the picture is much different. The changes since 12.04 (the last LTS release) are significant and, with one major exception, very welcome.

Ubuntu 14.04 is faster, stabler and overall much better than 12.04 and brings far <a href="https://help.ubuntu.com/14.04/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html">too many updates</a> to cover in full detail here. 

A few of the highlights include better support for high-resolution displays, TRIM is now turned on for Intel and Samsung SSDs, Nvidia Optimus support has been improved, and all of the default applications have been updated to their latest stable versions. For the major apps that means Firefox 28, LibreOffice 4.2.3 and Nautilus 3.10. Ubuntu 14.04 is using Linux kernel 3.13.

Beyond the hardware support improvements and underlying app updates, which is perhaps most notable for the more conservative, LTS-updates-only crowd is the news that 14.04 adds back some long-missing features that Canonical had previously removed from Unity.

There doesn't seem to be a clear explanation for why Canonical has had a change of heart on these previously no-go user interface options, but with 14.04 you can now get menus in windows, minimize windows from the Unity Launcher, customize Launcher menus to suit your needs and even see the full suite of menu items in previously hobbled apps like the Nautilus file browser.

Of these, the menu-in-the-windows option is perhaps the most significant. Of all the desktop paradigms Ubuntu upended with the launch of Unity, bumping menus to the top bar was perhaps the most confounding for long-time users, especially those coming to Linux from Windows.

The justification for moving menus to the top of the screen has always been that it saved on vertical screen real estate (it's also more in line with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law">Fitts' Law</a> and, as an added bonus, mimics what you'll find in OS X, often noted for its usability and design). 

Ubuntu 14.04 adds back an option to have window level menus. There are two caveats though. First, the defaults have not changed. If you want the new menus you'll need to head to the system settings and enable them yourself. Once you've done that you'll find that Canonical's decision on where to put the menus is a tad unusual -- instead of adding the menu as a line of options below the window title bar the way you might expect, Ubuntu 14.04 packs them into the title bar itself to save space.

The good news is that this in fact works quite well. Not only does it save a few pixels, it just feels less cluttered and more in line with the overall Ubuntu desktop design ethos. 

That design ethos is getting stronger too, or at least it feels that way given the continued attention to details in this release. There are many other small, easy-to-overlook visual improvements which, while they may not jump out at you, go a long way to making the overall experience of Ubuntu feel much more polished than other Linux distros. 

A good example of this is new borderless application windows that get rid of the one pixel, nearly-black border element. An equally small, but nice, touch is the new GTK3 window decorations, which mean much smoother anti-aliased corners -- something that might not be noticeable without a high-resolution screen, but will be much appreciated if you have one.

A more noticeable example is the new live window resizing. When you drag a window Ubuntu no longer draws a yellow box to visualize the window being resized, instead the window just resizes (this has been an option in previous releases, but it's now the default).

If such tiny UI refinements don't impress you then Ubuntu is probably not the Linux distro for you. But for those who, like me, have been wondering for years when someone would starting giving the Linux desktop the UI attention it deserves, well, Ubuntu 14.04 is unquestionably the best option around.

There are two big catches though, because this is open source software and nothing is ever perfect. The first is that Unity needs modern hardware. Its slick user interface isn't going to sing on your 5 year old netbook (that's what <a href="http://crunchbang.org/">Crunchbang</a> is for).

The other, more serious problem with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is the controversial changes regarding online search and user privacy.

The taint of Ubuntu's privacy blunders with the last few releases have cast something of a shadow over the distro that used to be a favorite of Linux newcomers and old hands alike, perhaps doubly so with Edward Snowden and company revealing ever more alarming invasions of privacy every day. Criticizing Ubuntu's on-by-default Amazon search features a year ago often meant being called paranoid. Not so much today. 

The potential privacy leaks may not be a concern for desktop users already happily logged in to Google services, Facebook and file syncing tools like Dropbox -- which all expose users to potentially far greater privacy intrusion than Ubuntu's Amazon search results -- but for enterprise-level deployments, upgrading to 14.04 and maintaining privacy for employees means a whole lot of Amazon Scope disabling.

The good news is that it appears Unity's privacy offending Amazon search scope <a href="https://plus.google.com/113579520393333767984/posts/Ec3rprkut6M">will become opt-in</a> (as the EFF, FSF and others have argued it should be). The bad news is that won't happen until Unity 8 arrives (hopefully 14.10, but possibly not until later). In other words, not in time for this LTS release. 

That makes 14.04 perhaps not quite as appealing of an upgrade for LTS users as it otherwise should be. If you're just one person installing Ubuntu on your Desktop machine then it's pretty easy to turn off the privacy-violating bits. But Enterprise customers will most likely have to think twice about this upgrade, which is shame because for LTS users this is a problem that won't be solved until the next LTS rolls around in 2016.

In the time between now and then Canonical will be rolling out a mobile OS. In fact Canonical head Mark Shuttleworth says devices will be available in Q3 of this year. In the mean time Ubuntu 14.04 is not just a great LTS release, but perhaps the best version of Ubuntu yet -- provided you can get past the privacy problems.