Bland is grand
Besides the news about the end of Unity, this release is short on attention-grabbing features. Here’s why that’s a good thing.
So here’s an admission, all those attention-seeking words on the cover are a little misleading. There haven’t been any particularly revolutionary changes in this release, it’s not necessarily more stable than the last one and, realistically, you’re not going to gain much beyond larger version numbers by upgrading the LTS to this release (shut up!–Ed).
Believe it or not, these are all Good Things: major changes upset people and installing a new operating system every six months does likewise. Indeed, if you are happy with your Ubuntu 16.04 installation then consider following Canonical’s advice and keeping it – LTS editions are extensively tested and supported for five years, unlike the interstitial releases which are supported only until the next one comes along. This release, and many before it, have all been about gently refining a well-proven recipe. Yes, there have been major changes to Ubuntu’s plumbing over this period – we’ve seen init systems come ( systemd) and go ( Upstart), we’ve seen application menus move from inside the application window to the top bar (and then, optionally, to the titlebar) and we’ve shed no tears for the loss of the obnoxious UbuntuSoftware Centre. There’s also a great deal of effort just to maintain compatibility with newer versions of the underlying GNOME components on which Unity depends and, more generally, just to track new releases of everything in the repos. But for the most part anyone who was familiar with Ubuntu since about 12.04 would have had no difficulty navigating subsequent Ubuntus, and that remains the case for 17.04. With the exception of Windows 8, we could say the same thing about Windows since Windows 95, and about the OS formerly known as OSX, since its inception in 2001. Innovation is great, but so is not breaking something that isn’t broken – a key feature of any good desktop environment is that it stays out of your way, and the notion of shiny, disruptive features runs entirely orthogonal to this.
Add to this the general statistic that people are doing less and less with their desktop machines (Android is now more popular for browsing the web than Windows according to recent surveys), opting rather to use apps on their phones, tablets or ocular implants, and you begin to see that trying to lure more users to Ubuntu on the desktop with headlinegrabbing features is largely futile. Such an endeavour will just infuriate or alienate existing users. And, relatively speaking, there were never very many of them to begin with.
Beyond the desktop
Remember that Canonical is a company and desktop Ubuntu does very little to boost its profits. These come from lucrative enterprise support contracts and public cloud offerings. The Server version of Canonical’s OS, and in particular the many customised cloud images of it, has orders of magnitude more users and installations than desktop Ubuntu and this ratio is only going to increase with time. Latterly Ubuntu Core is coming to the fore, having already been used to power drones, robots, SDR base stations and more. It hopes (through transactional updates, AppArmor and container voodoo) to bring some decorum to the wild and securitybarren world of IoT, and thanks to Canonical’s diverse industry partnerships there will soon be many, many more devices running this OS. There is still a huge chunk of common code between these flavours and the desktop ones, which helps to keep the development process from becoming too fragmented, and reduces some of the burden of
“Innovation is great, but so is not breaking something that isn’t broken.”
maintaining a libre desktop OS. A universal and secure packaging mechanism, ie, Snaps, relates desktop and device installations. The now abandoned push towards Unity 8 aimed to unify user interfaces across desktops and mobile devices, and again spoke to this idea of a common, converged codebase. It’s a different approach to Red Hat, which uses its free Fedora distro as a staging area for the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and it’s a different approach to SUSE, the ‘other’ corporate Linux player, which sponsors OpenSUSE. But making money out of free software requires innovation and ingenuity. Some users may disagree with Canonical’s vision, and the beauty of open source means there’s no shortage of other distros for those users to run to, but from our point of view it’s an exciting time for Ubuntu and an exciting time for Linux in general.