14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu 14.04 is scheduled for an April release, as you might expect, but a proposal has been made to release an additional image, which is non-UEFI.
Most hardware sold today comes with UEFI support, but it seems that switching the Ubuntu release model to UEFI-only might pose some problems.
“It seems that the number of pure 32 bit UEFI systems is growing and so we can't continue to ignore them. The reason that we don't support UEFI on 32 bit images now is that some older systems have broken biosen that blow up when the el torito boot catalog contains multiple entries, and we don't want to have to maintain and test two separate images.”
“What if we transition the main 32 bit image to UEFI support, and to support those few people that still have very aged systems that don't deal with it, we could have a non UEFI flavor of only the netinst image?” said Phillip Susi, an Ubuntu developer.
A net install image for Ubuntu is not the same as a full-blown version and it's a lot easier to maintain, not to mention that it's also smaller. The developer hasn't received an answer yet, but it will be interesting to see what Canonical will do about this issue.