14 DAY TRIAL // Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical, has chosen the name of the next Ubuntu, 14.10, and it will be called Utopic Unicorn.
The Ubuntu developers don't usually take a lot of rest between development cycles, which means that work on Ubuntu 14.10 will start any day now and, in six months’ time, in October 2014, we'll have a new release. Granted, it won't be an LTS version, but Mark Shuttleworth wants the development team to test the waters on what's possible and make some big leaps forward.
“So bring your upstanding best to the table – or the forum – or the mailing list – and let’s make something amazing. Something unified and upright, something about which we can be universally proud. And since we’re getting that once-every-two-years chance to make fresh starts and dream unconstrained dreams about what the future should look like, we may as well go all out and give it a dreamlike name. Let’s get going on the utopic unicorn. Give it stick,” said Mark Shuttleworth in his regular announcement.
The name of Utopic Unicorn is a little different from what we’d usually expect. None of the names chosen so far has been mythical, which makes Ubuntu 14.10 a peculiar version. Either he couldn't find a real and interesting animal to use for the name, or he just couldn't resist to the use of Unicorn.
Canonical doesn't leave the name choosing process to the community, like Fedora does. It would generate the most bizarre names and it's likely Ubuntu would end up with some funky codename that no one really likes.
From what Mark Shuttleworth has been describing in his post, it seems that Ubuntu developers have been given a blank check to make something different. This doesn't mean that the next Ubuntu will be radically different, but if we keep in mind that it's a system with only a nine-month support period, it's very likely that they will experiment a great deal.
“The discipline of an LTS constrains our creativity – our users appreciate the results of a focused effort on performance and stability and maintainability, and we appreciate the spring cleaning that comes with a focus on technical debt. But the point of spring cleaning is to make room for fresh ideas and new art, and our next release has to raise the roof in that regard. And what a spectacular time to be unleashing creativity in Ubuntu,” also noted Mark Shuttleworth.
It's also very likely that Ubuntu developers will try to get a little bit closer to their convergence goal of having a single codebase running on all the platforms. It won't be ready in this cycle, but we will probably see some major improvements.
All hail Utopic Unicorn!