Ubuntu 12.10 has a code name. It's:

By +Frank B.
in Linux

 Share

Recommended Posts

Grand Master

+Frank B. Subscriber²

Posted
  • Subscriber²
Posted

Quality has a new name

This quirky scheme of adjectives and animals presents a pretty puzzle every six months. What mix of characteristics do we want to celebrate in the next release? Here we are, busily finalizing the precise pangolin (which was a rather perfect product placement for a scaly anteater, all things considered) and before one realises it?s time to talk turkey, so to speak, about Q! Our code names may raise a quizzical eyebrow here and there, but they capture the zeitgeist of a cycle and shape our discussions in surprising ways. The quest for a name has no quick answer unless, of course, you jump to the last paragraph ;)

12.04 being an LTS we?ve been minding our P?s and Q?s, but many of our quality-oriented practices from 12.04 LTS will continue into Q territory. We?ll keep the platform usable throughout the cycle, because that helped hugely to encourage daily use of the release, which in turn gives us much better feedback on questions of quality. And we?ll ratchet up the continuous integration, smoke testing and automated benchmarking of the release, since we can do it all in the cloud. We have, so to speak, stacks and stacks of cloud to use. So quality is quotidian rather than quarterly. And it is both qualitative and quantitative, with user research and testing continuing to shape our design decisions. The effort we put into polishing Unity and the rest of the platform in 12.04 seem to have paid off handsomely, with many quondam quarrelsome suddenly quiescent in the face of a surge in support for the work.

But the finest quality is that without a name, so support for ?quality? as a codename would at best be qualified. Every release has quality first these days ? they all get used, on the server, on devices, and while the term of maintenance might vary, our commitment to interim releases is just as important as that to an LTS.

Our focus on quality permeates from the platform up to the code we write upstream, and our choices of upstream components too. We require tests and gated trunks for all Canonical codebases, and prefer upstreams that share the same values. Quality starts at the source, it?s not something that can be patched in after the fact. And I?m delighted that we have many upstreams using our tools to improve their quality too! We have awesome tools for daily builds from branches, continuous integration support in Launchpad, the ability to provide a gated trunk with tests run in the cloud for projects that really care about quality. Rumours and allegations of a move from Upstart to SystemD are unfounded: Upstart has a huge battery of tests, the competition has virtually none. Upstart knows everything it wants to be, the competition wants to be everything. Quality comes from focus and clarity of purpose, it comes from careful design and rigorous practices. After a review by the Ubuntu Foundations team our course is clear: we?re committed to Upstart, it?s the better choice for a modern init, innit. For our future on cloud and client, Upstart is crisp, clean and correct. It will be a pleasure to share all the Upstart-enablement patches we carry with other family friends as soon as their release is ready and they can take a breath, so to speak.

From a styling point of view, we think in terms of quadruples: this next release starts a cycle of four, which will culminate in 14.04 LTS. So there?s an opportunity to refresh the look. That will kick off with a project on typography to make sure we are expressing ourselves with crystal clarity ? making the most of Ubuntu?s Light and Medium font weights for a start. And a project on iconography, with the University of Reading, to refine the look of apps and interfaces throughout the platform. It?s amazing how quaint the early releases of Ubuntu look compared to the current style. And we?re only just getting started! In our artistic explorations we want to embrace tessellation as an expression of the part-digital, part-organic nature of Ubuntu. We love the way tessellated art expresses both the precision and reliability of our foundations, and the freedom and collaboration of a project driven by people making stuff for people. There?s nothing quixotic in our desire to make Ubuntu the easiest, steadiest, and most beautiful way to live digitally.

On the fauna front, the quotable campaign for the Queer Quokka is quorate but, it must sometimes be said, this is not a democracy. One man?s favourite furball is another?s mangy marsupial. No, the quintessential stories of Q will be all about style on the client, with a refresh of our theme and typography, a start on new iconography and perhaps even a new form factor taking flight. So brown is out and something colourful and light is called for. On the cloud front, the new virtualized network madness called Quantum will make its appearance. Being a first cut, it?s more likely to be Folsom than wholesome, but it?s going to be worth calling out, and the name is reminiscent of our package-oriented practices, where goodness is delivered one piece at a time. And so the stage is set for a decision: I give you the Quantal Quetzal, soon to be dressed in tessellated technicolour, now open for toolchains, kernels and other pressing preparatory packages.

Source: Mark Shuttleworth's blog

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1072295-ubuntu-1210-has-a-code-name-its/
Share on other sites
Grand Master

Syanide

Posted
Posted
From a styling point of view, we think in terms of quadruples: this next release starts a cycle of four, which will culminate in 14.04 LTS. So there?s an opportunity to refresh the look. That will kick off with a project on typography to make sure we are expressing ourselves with crystal clarity ? making the most of Ubuntu?s Light and Medium font weights for a start. And a project on iconography, with the University of Reading, to refine the look of apps and interfaces throughout the platform.

Nice to see him take this seriously. The work they've done on the Ubuntu font is amazing, if the icons and *crosses fingers* new and proper interface guidelines are half as good, we've got a winner!

Grand Master

.Neo

Posted
Posted

Yeah because Microsoft and Apple would never do anything silly like that.

It's only a code name, get over it. This get brought up every time Ubuntu do a release, it's kinda getting old now.

Why people frequently feel the need to involve other parties as an excuse is beyond me. What Apple and Microsoft are doing is irrelevant, this thread is about Ubuntu.

Grand Master

cork1958

Posted
Posted

Seems Unity it's here to stay... and I dont like that one bit.

I had heard of Unity before trying Xubuntu 11.10 but never really checked into it much. Then I got to messing around with it on an older machine, which most of mine are, and that was horrid!!

Ubuntu has definitely came a long ways since the first time I tried it back on 5.04, but it's not something I can keep on my machines even in dual boot mode (thank goodness for Wubi there) It just seems to get old fast and there always seems to be some kind of issue with something by the time you've used it and updated it for a while.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Posts

    • New PowerToys update fixes memory leaks and other issues

      By Dutchie64 · Posted

      Yup, that's a doozy right there 😄
    • New PowerToys update fixes memory leaks and other issues

      By Dutchie64 · Posted

      It's a bundle of tools created by a variety of people, so things can go wrong sometimes. It's a great addition to Windows, and I use a lot of the tools on a daily basis. Also, it's still a 0.**** release so quick updates are to be expected 😉
    • Why Delta Chat is the best decentralized messenger you have probably never tried

      By Nas · Posted

      Oh, I did. And it's even worse than I was hoping! Besides a lot of techno-babble jargon (yes I understand 100% of it but it's still all just techno-babble) there's 2 key points that make me super-weary about even considering testing this out. -- By default, after installation, a relay is automatically set up, so you do not need to care about that. * Non-chatmail apps use email servers as a long-term message archive while chatmail clients use email servers for ephemeral instant message relay. * Supporting the full variety of classic email setups would require considerable development and maintenance efforts, and complicate making chatmail-based messaging more resilient, reliable and fast. -- Basically, the end-user device is the 'server' (relay) so there is NO ARCHIVING whatsoever because every message is necessarily ephemeral. Great for techno-paranoia (and for illicit activities preferring no tracks to cover) but terrible for everybody else. It's also ironically contradictory to engineering principles of redundancies besides the transport layers due to the explicit absence of any persistent storage. Instead of 'classic email address' retaining multi-GB messaging archives on its server, now every device must retain 100% of those storage demands. (Email messages were originally meant to be short correspondences, not the multi-MB attachments boondoggle that now exists with unlimited spam engines flooding every potential recipient.) Any device swap or reset (or loss) makes the entire message history go bye-bye forever... lest there's an off-device auto-archival "relay" mechanism that's really a separate server that holds onto all transported messages (an email server) that utilizes 'chatmail email address' identities (like an email server) and its own persistent storage archive (like an email server). But... this solution is hoping to exist alongside real-world email address identities (based on the email server relay pathway) but simply render messages in chat thread format in an ephemeral manner (with contents being encrypted, and messages auto-expiring) ... In the end, it's a chat app/experience for the Web3/P2P-at-all-costs zealots. (I have accts on all sorts of federated web3 services so I understand the technical and non-technical alike.) For any practical users, however, it's just another service to download/install, register, cross-share id cards/qr codes, but know that there's no history/archive whatsoever (by design) so no account/message recovery whatsoever... update the device, install a bummed update patch, or dare upgrade your device... all history, poof, gone. Ya gotta start everything over again like they're a brand new person.
    • You've tried DuckDuckGo and Brave Search, now get serious with SearXNG

      By zikalify · Posted

      You've tried DuckDuckGo and Brave Search, now get serious with SearXNG by Paul Hill Over the last decade, it has become quite trendy to dump Google Search in favor of privacy-preserving alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Brave Search. These search engines have done a very good job at highlighting dodgy practices by Google, such as adjusting search results based on what it thinks you’ll like (filter bubble) and stalking you around the web to advertise to you. While these search engines are good starting points when compared to non-private services like Google, there are still quite a few issues with them. For example, both DuckDuckGo and Brave Search require running non-free JavaScript in your web browser, which is comparable to running proprietary software on your computer, meaning you can be sure about what it’s actually doing in the background. Another issue is that these search engines are hosted on the respective companies’ servers, and you are using a service that you don’t control. Finally, DuckDuckGo, while offering privacy features, relies heavily on Microsoft’s infrastructure for its results and, in the past, has permitted Microsoft tracking scripts. If you are looking for a more private search solution than DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, and Startpage, then I recommend taking a look at SearXNG. It is a privacy-respecting metasearch engine that can be used via different public instances, which is useful for mobile users, or you can install it on your computer or server and run it locally with maximum control. Unlike Google, Bing, or Brave Search, which crawl the web and have their own search indexes, SearXNG is a metasearch engine, meaning it taps other search engines, stripping your identifying data, such as IP address, user agent, and cookies, in the process. Your search query is sent to the other search engines you enable before aggregating the results. SearXNG has deployment flexibility. If you are a casual user or a mobile user and don’t want to run SearXNG locally, you can use a public instance that is hosted by someone else. The main problem with this is that you are putting trust in the maintainer of the instance regarding stuff like logs that they may keep; good hosts should have a privacy policy explaining their policies. If you are trying to use SearXNG, you can also install the software on your device and then head to 127.0.0.1:8080 in your browser and search from there. While you don’t have to worry about a third-party admin like the public instances, search engines could ultimately block your IP address if they frown on you pulling in their search results locally. If you want to run it locally, it’s a good idea to use proxies or VPNs to hide your actual IP. You don’t have to worry about this with a public instance, as search engines never see your IP address. The main privacy benefit of using SearXNG is that it isolates your identity from the underlying engines that it’s capable of searching, such as Google and Bing. These search engines will only see requests coming from a generic server, so they can’t profile you and create a bubble filter that influences what results you see. This also ensures that your search engine doesn’t turn into an echo chamber that prevents you from reading alternative points of view. As a free software project, you are allowed to inspect SearXNG to make sure there are no negative features bundled inside. This sets it apart from the privacy search engines mentioned earlier because you can’t check their source code. As a meta search engine, you are not restricted to getting results from one source. Due to the fact that it scrapes content from other websites, your SearXNG instance will periodically get blocked from different providers, so it’s good to select a range of sources as a backup. While enabling all of the services will give you great results, this can make searching slower. I am personally happy with slower searches for the best results, but you can always check which providers are slowing down your search from the search results page and disable them to speed things up. If you want decent results quickly, enable the main search providers such as Google, Brave, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Bing, and Yahoo. This way, you get wide coverage without the latency. On the Engines tab in Preferences, do note that there are different tabs, such as General, Images, and Videos, with their own providers that can be toggled and are not covered by "Enable all" while on the General tab, so be sure to dig into each. Just a note, if you want to enable everything, press "Enable all" in one tab, then hit save at the bottom of the page, then do the next tab, and so on. If you press "Enable all", then do that in each tab, and then save, nothing will stick. When I had just some of the search engines enabled, I searched “define nefarious” and results came back with the definition of “define” - obviously that was a sucky result. However, when I had everything enabled, it found dictionary pages for the word “nefarious” and even had an inline definition on the sidebar, which is quite nice too - that was delivered by WolframAlpha for anyone wondering! Probably the worst thing about this meta search engine is that the engines you select are saved with a cookie, so you must enable them on every new device you use SearXNG on, including if you decide to go into incognito mode with your web browser. Honestly, I would say this is the most annoying aspect, and perhaps if your browser lets you choose a separate private browsing search engine, then it would be best to use DuckDuckGo for this portion of your browsing. Another weakness of SearXNG is the random blocking of it by search providers. When you are on the results page, expand the “Response time” box, and it will show things like “Suspended: too many requests” or “access denied”. This is why it is good to enable several providers so that there is always a fallback to get results from. I won’t pretend SearXNG will be for everyone, however, if you enable all of the providers and put up with the slower response time, the results can be really amazing. Even if you don’t want to use it as your daily driver, keeping a bookmark handy that links to it is a good idea if you ever feel like doing a deep dive into a niche topic where other search engines are just failing to bring up any good result, due to the amount of sources it looks on. If you’re interested in radical user control over the software you use, installing SearXNG locally can also be a good idea, but be prepared to be temporarily blocked from sites if you trigger bot sensors without a VPN. Personally, I’ve opted to use a public instance, rather than install it myself. If you want to use it via a public instance, head over to searx.space to find a provider. Let us know in the comments if you have used SearXNG or its predecessor, Searx. What do you think about the quality of the results?
    • Windows 11 is getting redesigned taskbar settings in new build

      By Captain_Eric · Posted

      Dear Neowin, If it is not too much trouble, can you start using the new-ish designations for Insider Preview? "Experimental" is different than "former Dev" as it can apply to different models, eg 26H1 or 26H2 etc, right? No need to seed confusion IMHO. And, please "finally" update your graphics. OK?

  • Recent Achievements

    • Week One Done
      flexorcist earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      Woland13 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      Woland13 earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Year In
      bernmeister earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Week One Done
      Scoobystu earned a badge
      Week One Done

  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      503
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      226
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      158
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      75
    5. 5
      FloatingFatMan
      71
    Show More

  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!