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Canonical has pushed out the final beta release of Ubuntu 14.10, also know as "Utopic Unicorn".
Last month a number of the various flavors of Ubuntu -- Kubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome, Xubuntu and the brand new Ubuntu Mate (yes, it's official now) -- all participated in <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/09/04/ubuntu_14_10_betas/">the first beta release</a>, but the main Unity Desktop release has been skipping that initial beta release for a while. That makes this release the one and only beta for Ubuntu's main release.
This has been the pattern for the last several releases -- that Unity sits out the first beta. This time, however, it feels like the Unity flavor of Ubuntu may as well sit out the rest 14.10 release cycle as well.
Almost nothing has changed in the daily builds that have come out since 14.04 was released earlier this year.
That's not surprising really, Canonical has never had big plans for this release. Head over to the <a href="https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/utopic">Utopic Blueprints page</a> and you'll see there are only 35 items listed. Compare that with the <a href="https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/saucy">13.10 release cycle</a> of last year, which had 195 items.
Peruse the list for Utopic and you'll find that there is work being done on a number of "cloud" features as well as some security enhancements. The Blueprints pages aren't the end of the story in terms of what's new in 14.10, but they do show a decided lack of development happening on Canonical's end.
Things are happening elsewhere though. The usual slew of standard Unity apps have all seen updates -- Firefox, OpenOffice, Thunderbird and Rhythmbox are all at the latest stable releases. The underlying GNOME elements remain at GNOME 3.10, which seems a little odd given that the Ubuntu GNOME flavor has managed to moved on to GNOME 3.12.
There are some new things under the hood as well. The kernel has been updated to 3.16 in this beta, which means some new hardware support. There are two items of note in 3.16, one is support for Dell's free-fall feature which detects if your Latitude laptop is currently falling and might be the silliest thing going in the hardware world. Unless you're in the field with a bomb proof case that gets kicked around a lot, in which case this might be useful. The other notable thing in the 3.16 kernel is a new Synaptic input driver, which might fix misbehaving trackpads if you've had problems.
Kernel and application updates are standard fare for distro updates, but beyond that there's not a whole lot to see in the Utopic beta.
Part of the reason there are hardly any new features in this release -- and the reason there aren't even that many planned new features -- is that Ubuntu is about to embark on a massive change under the hood, the sort of change that you don't roll out to users until the dust has settled.
In this case, those changes are the move to the Mir graphics display stack and Unity 8, which runs atop Mir not just on the desktop but also on other devices like tablets and Ubuntu Phones.
That's why there is another, parallel Unity release available known as Ubuntu Desktop Next. It's here that you'll find big changes under development. Mir, Unity 8 and all the other exciting new stuff that's coming in the next couple of years lives in this channel for now.
Before you rush out and download that Desktop Next image be aware that it's the bleeding edge. Not bleeding edge as in buggy, bleeding edge as in won't boot at all in VirtualBox on my Debian machine. It did boot in a VMWare virtual machine running on OS X, but still offered up the phone/tablet interface rather than a desktop version of Unity 8. That's to be expected though, given that, according to development milestones Canonical has posted, Unity 8 for the desktop is still very rough around the edges. On the plus side, the mobile interface looks very nice.
Suffice to say that there is a lot of work to be done between Ubuntu Desktop Next in its current state and what Canonical is hoping to ship when 16.04 rolls around in a year and a half. Convergence, it seems, is still very much a work in progress.
In the mean time we have 14.10, which thus far is looking more like what you get from a routine, mid-release cycle update than an actual new release.
That would be disappointing -- and indeed is no doubt still disappointing for some -- were it not for Ubuntu 14.04, which is such a good release that Canonical can probably get away with letting it sit for a while.
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