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Canonical has pushed out another modest update for the current poster child of desktop Linux.
Ubuntu 15.04, nicknamed Vivid Vervet, packs one huge change under the hood -- systemd is here -- but most users will notice very little difference in this release.
There are a couple of new things that make 15.04 worth the upgrade from previous versions, but the really big changes in Ubuntu's future, like the move to Unity 8 and the whole "convergence" of the desktop and mobile versions, remain, well, in the future.
In the mean time Ubuntu desktop fans get a few nice improvements, developers find some welcome new tools and a new flavor -- Ubuntu MATE -- joins the fold. Oh and there's some thing called systemd you may have heard of.
The biggest news in 15.04 is undoubtedly to move to systemd as the default init system. To understand why the move to systemd is a big deal it helps to understand what an init system is to wit, it's the system that launches all other systems on your machine. When you boot Linux the init system loads the drivers you need, turns on your network connection, fires up the necessary system service and then loads the desktop. Without an init system you have no way to do anything.
Previous versions of Ubuntu used a homegrown init system called Upstart, which was Ubuntu's attempt to create an init system. However, Ubuntu remains a Debian derivative and with Debian moving to systemd, Ubuntu has elected to abandon its own efforts and get on the systemd bandwagon. The decision appears to be purely pragmatic, systemd is a many tentacled octopus and now that it's well into Debian Ubuntu really has no choice.
Among developers there's been considerably resistance to systemd. No one really wants to keep the old, and, at this point, very crufty SysV (that's why Ubuntu long ago created Upstart), but not everyone likes systemd. The main complaint about systemd is that it tries to do too much. It isn't just an init system, it also wants to manage user logins, handle logging and half a dozen other tasks. This of course goes against that original Unix ideal of doing one thing and doing it well. The dislike is strong enough that there's now a Debian fork whose primary goal is to keep Debian systemd free.
Even Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth once <a href="http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1295">expressed his dislike of systemd</a>, calling it, "hugely invasive and hardly justified." The problem Shuttleworth had with systemd was practical. He was worried that "formerly-independent pieces of code, which happen to be under the control of folks driving systemd, have been rolled into that codebase." In other words, systemd is a very all or nothing init system and not one that distros can easily customize to suit their needs. Still, with 15.04 Ubuntu is making the move from nothing to all.
For the average user the move to systemd should be transparent, which is to say you probably won't notice anything different. That said, I had repeated problems with systemd's journald in a virtual machine. The same problem didn't crop up when installed on actual hardware.
The only reason you'll likely be affected by the move to systemd is if you have a lot of Upstart scripts, which will mean you need to change a few things in your scripts. Canonical has posted a handy <a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SystemdForUpstartUsers">Systemd For Upstart Users</a> guide that will help you migrate your scripts because make no mistake, while you can still use Upstart (in Grub select advanced options and you'll see one option to boot with Upstart), systemd is the future of Ubuntu and virtually every other distro out there.
The more noticeable changes in Ubuntu 15.04 for desktop users are a couple UI tweaks in Unity, namely the ability to always show menu items. That is, application menus items have long been hidden away in Unity. In order to see them you had to mouse over the top bar. There's now a setting to make them visible all the time. To change the menu visibility you'll either need to paste some code in your terminal or install the Dconf Editor. If you go with the latter method just head to com > canonical > unity and look for the option to "always show menus".
Also note that the "locally integrated menus" are not the default as they were in the beta. That's a fancy name for having application menus in the application window rather than the top bar.
There aren't really any other major visible changes in this release. The Unity 7 line is pretty much a ghost town of development at this point as all the developer effort is (understandably) being poured into Unity 8. Unity in 15.04 is at version 7.3, which does have a few bug fixes and refinements, including a particularly annoying bug involving the HUD menu and fullscreen apps, which now play nice together. The kernel and Compiz have both been updated, with the former now sitting at 3.19.3.
15.04 ships with GTK 3.14.9, just missing out on GNOME 3.16, which was released after Ubuntu's feature freeze for this release cycle. That means that most of Ubuntu's GNOME apps are also still at the 3.14 release version, including Nautilus, GNOME Terminal and Videos (Totem). That's quite a bit better than 14.10, which still shipped with, for example, Nautilus 3.10, but it's hardly the cutting edge of GNOME development.
The rest of the standard Ubuntu application suite has been bumped up to the latest versions as well. This release contains Firefox 37, LibreOffice 4.4, Thunderbird 31.6 and Rhythmbox 3.1 among other, smaller app updates.
Ubuntu 15.04 also sees the release of some newly re-packaged developer tools, including "Ubuntu Make", which is a rebranding of last year's Ubuntu Developer Tools Center. Similar to Fedora's Developer Assistant, Ubuntu Make is a packaging system for installing complete developer environments with a single command. You can easily install, for example, the Android NDK and SDK, Firefox Developer Edition or any of more than a dozen other development environments. Once Ubuntu Make is installed you can create a new environment as easily as typing "umake android."
If you've made the leap to container-based development tools you might want to check out the new lightweight <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/tools/snappy">Snappy Ubuntu Core</a>, which is designed with devices and containers in mind. There's great support for Docker, but Ubuntu also has its own Docker-like take on containerization that's worth check out as well.
This release also sees the first official version of the new Ubuntu MATE flavor, which features the MATE desktop with Ubuntu under the hood. The result is something close to Ubuntu circa version 9.10. But with less brown.
The question for desktop users is -- should I upgrade? There's definitely enough small tweaks and bug fixes that make Ubuntu 15.04 worth the upgrade unless you prefer to stick with LTS releases. That said, the vast majority of these small changes will eventually be backported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, so if you're on LTS for the stability, just sit tight, the new stuff will be available soon. Developers who'd like to get a head start on the transition to systemd, as well as those of us who prefer to always have the latest and greatest running on our machines, can grab the update from Canonical.
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