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The first beta release of Ubuntu 14.04 is here, offering Ubuntu users a glimpse of what's coming when Trusty Tahr arrives in April.
This is a Long Term Support release, which means Canonical will provide support for 5 years. It also means 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.
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.
Instead this release sees a bunch of small, incremental improvements to Unity and the addition of some long-missing features that Canonical had previously rejected.
It's the latter that makes Trusty Tahr the most surprising, particularly since, in both cases, Ubuntu developers explicitly rejected the ideas when they were initially proposed.
Whatever the reason for the change of heart, many users will no doubt welcome the news that Ubuntu 14.04 will include menus in windows and an option to make apps minimize when you click them in the Unity Launcher.
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. The justification 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>). With that in mind it should not be surprising to learn that, yes indeed, 14.04 will be adding window level menus, but, instead of adding the menu as a line of options below the window title bar the way you might expect, Ubuntu 14.04 will pack them into the title bar itself to save space.
You might think this would hobble your ability to drag and rearrange windows, but it does not. Unity is quite adept at recognizing a drag vs a click and in my testing I never had any trouble moving windows or accessing menu items.
While the menu-in-the-title-bar implementation is pretty slick, and plenty stable enough to use, the defaults remain the same -- menus are up in the menu bar at the top of the screen, just as they have been since Unity arrived in 11.04. If you want menus in your title bars you'll need to head to the Appearance pane of the System Settings panel where you'll see a new option to "show the menus for a window". Just check the option "In the window's title bar" and you'll have your window-level menus back.
Speaking of application menus, Canonical has also reversed course a bit and now includes the full menus for apps like the Nautilus file browser, which once again includes menu items like "File", "Edit" "View" and so on.
Another surprising reversal is Ubuntu's decision to allow users to change what happens when you click items in the Unity Launcher. Unlike the typical desktop dock/panel, double-clicking an item in the Unity launcher just gives that application focus (pulling it to the front in most cases). This behavior mirrors what you'll find in Apple's OS X, but is different than what you'll find in Windows, GNOME, KDE, XFCE and most other desktops with some kind of "dock".
With 14.04 it will be possible to modify the default behavior of the Launcher. That may not sound all that exciting, but this feature request is <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ayatana-design/+bug/733349">three years old</a> and, for a very long time, was simply marked "won't fix".
That, after three years, Canonical suddenly changes its mind on two much-requested features hopefully means the company is starting to listen to its users a bit more.
As with the new menus-in-the-window option, the default behavior of the Unity Launcher will remain the same. There will, however, be an option to change the behavior to minimize windows on click.
In another welcome change from past releases, you can now make the Unity Launcher icons much smaller, all the way down to 16px. That's good news of you're running Ubuntu 14.04 on a smaller screen and you want to avoid that bunched up cluster of unrecognizable icons at the bottom of the Launcher.
There are other small -- tiny even -- touches that see Canonical paying quite a bit of attention to details in this release. For example application windows are now borderless. The one pixel, nearly-black border element has been removed. An equally small, but nice touch are 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 design change is the new live window resizing. Now, by default when you grab a window edge and resize it the windows just resizes. Previously the windows would show a yellow box indicating its size as you dragged, but it didn't re-draw itself in real time. The live preview feature has been an option for a while, but it was tucked away in the Settings panel. Now it's on by default.
Such tiny UI refinements might be dismissed by many, or indeed missed altogether, but those of us who have for years been wishing someone would pay attention to design details in the Linux desktop world, well, this is what that looks like. Ubuntu has always been a distro that sweats the details so it's not surprising to see these changes here rather than say the Debian main line, but it's welcome nonetheless -- especially in an LTS release.
Tiny improvements aren't just part of this release, they are in fact the core of Ubuntu 14.04 -- fixing the tiny cuts and annoyances has long been the signature of LTS releases. Those of you anxious to see Mir on the desktop or Unity 8 are going to have to wait for 14.10 at least. Possibly even longer in the case of Mir, which may not make it to the desktop for at least another year.
Still, while there may not be much in the way of groundbreaking new features or anything else too flashy, judging by this beta, Ubuntu 14.04 is shaping up to be Ubuntu's best release in a long time, possibly ever.
The taint of Ubuntu's privacy blunders with the last few releases do still cast something of a shadow over the distro that used to be a favorite of Linux newcomers and old hands alike. But if such things don't bother you, and you have the hardware to support the Unity interface, Ubuntu 14.04 is likely to be one of the slickest, most polished Linux desktops you've ever tried.
That's great news for anyone sticking to the more stable, LTS-updates-only path, since this will be the first time such users move beyond 12.04, which frankly, feels like it was released far longer than just two years ago.
This will also likely be the last time Ubuntu is released solely for the desktop since Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has promised mobile devices in Q3 of this year, which means Ubuntu Mobile will soon be on the shelf as well.
If Ubuntu Mobile is able to do what iOS did for Apple -- that is, sell not just phones and tablets, but the corresponding desktop as well -- Canonical needs to have a great desktop ready to go. As of this beta at least, Ubuntu 14.04 is well on its way to being just that -- a great desktop on which to stake Ubuntu's future.
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