The new operating system from Canonical promises a lot of changes and new features

Apr 14, 2014 06:42 GMT  ·  By

Canonical is preparing the launch of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), one of their most important releases to date, which is scheduled to arrive on April 17.

The developers have made a lot of improvements in their latest Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) and the Linux community is waiting for the release with great interest. One of the main reasons for this anticipation is the fact that Canonical made some important changes to the operating system and now it's somewhat different from Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander), which is the current version.

When Canonical launched Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) back in October 2013, users “accused” the developers of making it a boring release. Everyone was expecting new features, but the distribution was considered to be too similar with the one before it, Ubuntu 13.04. Sure enough, there were many changes under the hood, but it was visually almost identical with the previous release.

Now, the developers from Canonical are trying to make the new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) a lot more attractive and they've made sure that it will feature numerous changes that will make it unique.

One of the biggest changes in the new operating system from Canonical that will land on April 17 is the way the menus are displayed. As you well know, the menus are displayed by default in the top bar, the one holding all the indicators. Now there is another way to do it, and it's especially useful for people with large screens. They are called Locally Integrated Menus and they are displayed right inside the windows frame. They activate only when needed and they don't usually show unless the user hovers the mouse over them.

Another interesting change is the fact that a new window decorator is now being used, which means that a number of features have been implemented, like antialiased corners for the windows and no more borders for the windows. You probably couldn't tell before, but the windows had a small, 1-pixel wide border that better defined the edges. That's gone now and the windows integrate a lot smoother into the surrounding environment.

Ubuntu developers also took care of that annoying lock screen. The Log-in menu has been managed for some time by the LightDM Greeter and it looked great, but the lock screen was not and it looked terrible and out of place. A new lockscreen is now in place and it looks and feels just like the Log-in menu.

These are just a few of the features in the new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), so be sure to check back on April 17 and read the full review for this Linux OS.