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All the signs of Spring are here. Flowers are blooming, trees leafing out and Canonical has released a beta of the next version of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 15.04, Vivid Vervet, arrived a couple of days ago, giving Ubuntu fans a sneak peek at what's coming in this Spring's update. The short answer is, there are some major changes, but if all goes well you'll hardly notice them. In fact, this just might be one of the biggest Ubuntu releases in several years, not for what you see -- though there are some changes there too -- but for what you don't.
Anyone paying any amount of attention to the Linux world over the past couple of years has likely at least heard of <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/">systemd</a>. Like the Debian packages that underpin Ubuntu, 15.04 will replace upstart with systemd by default. Actually, there's a small chance that's not true. If a major bug or regression rears its head in the next few weeks upstart might come back for the final release, but at this stage that appears unlikely.
The move to systemd as the default init system doesn't just apply to the Unity desktop, but affects every Ubuntu flavor and server builds as well.
So what is systemd and why do some people hate it? Systemd is a system and services manager. It keeps track of and manages pretty much the whole system. It also has some other nice features like snapshotting and restoring of the system state. It even supports SysV and LSB init scripts and can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit.
Unless you're a sysadmin with a ton of scripts that don't work with systemd, or you hate the monolithic nature of systemd on a philosophical level, you're unlikely to affected by it. There are some changes to be aware of -- starting and stopping process might be a little different -- but for the most part systemd just works. That said, there are still some show stopping bugs in Ubuntu's systemd integration, including systems that won't boot and won't shutdown (I experienced the latter problem installing in a virtual machine). Keep in mind that this is still a beta. Ubuntu betas tend to be so stable they lull you into thinking they're release quality software, but they aren't.
While you're unlikely to notice the systemd change (barring a bug that affects your system), you'll definitely notice the big visual change in this release -- the so-called Locally Integrated Menus are back. That is, menus are once again part of the window by default, rather than up in the universal menu bar. The menus don't have their own bar, rather they're part of the actual window bar. If a window is too narrow to display all the menu items, it will show a little arrow that contains the rest in a drop-down menu. You might think this would cause some inadvertent clicks, that is, you want to drag a window and instead you click a menu item, but in practice that hasn't happened to me.
You might not notice the new window-bar-based menus right away since they're hidden by default. It's not until you mouse over the menu bar that you actually see the items. That makes for a cleaner interface, but might be disorienting at first.
If, like me, you actually enjoyed the menu bar menu items you can easily get them back. Just head to System Settings > Appearance > Behavior.
There's also now an option to always show the menus. First you'll need to install the Dconf Editor. Then head to com > canonical > unity and look for the option to "always show menus".
The 15.04 beta ships with GTK 3.14.9 and that will be the case for the final release as well. Ubuntu just missed out on GNOME 3.16, which was released after Ubuntu's feature freeze for this release cycle. The mean 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 Ubuntu's basic suite of apps have not seen any spectacular updates, though there are plenty of bug fixes and small changes. Under the hood this release is based off the upstream 3.19.2 Linux Kernel and features Xorg server 1.17.1.
Overall Ubuntu 15.04 is shaping up to be a welcome update. Provided systemd is indeed the default when the final release rolls around next month this will be a big change for those using Ubuntu as a server or in the cloud. Desktop users will have less to look forward to (or dread, depending on your view of systemd) though the incremental updates continue to polish the already quite slick Unity desktop.
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