The Ubuntu distributions released version Hardy Heron, version 8.04 today after much anticipation. Mark Shuttleworth described this release as “our most significant ever”, when interviewed by the BBC. 8.04 definitely has some big expectations, as it the first LTS (Long Term Support) release in over two years.
For those of you not as familiar with Ubuntu’s “LTS” releases, it essentially states that the Ubuntu Community / Canonical have pledged to support this release with patches and bug-fixes for 5 years on a server and 3 years on a desktop from the release date. It also means that you can have CD’s of the release shipped to you for free (this could be a little delay though, due to the demand).
I for one have been using ubuntu/kubuntu for almost two years now, as I was brought into the fray with version 6.04. At that time was had been using Gentoo for some time, mostly due to the fact that I had been totally annoyed by all the other “popular” distributions. While I was fairly inexperience, causing me to be at the mercy of available packages, I found it difficult to pull in extra pieces that I found necessary (such as playing DVD’s and what not). I was drawn to Gentoo because I could easily get to the software packages that I wanted. The ability to manage dependencies was nice, but it played second fiddle to the accessibility of the packages. The major pitfall to Gentoo, as anyone who has ever used it, is the time investment in getting the system built and maintained. In addition to that, I somehow had the luck of attempting an emerge update when broken ebuilds were in the portage tree, causing catastrophic problems with my install (never good when your in the middle of an installation step of glibc and it fails).
It was only until Kubuntu became available that I went ahead and gave the distro a try. I was instantly hooked, as I had the package availability of debian, but with the package polishing to where having say the latest release of KDE wasn’t that difficult. Oh yes, and by the way I had tried debian testing at the time, and could never get kdemultimedia to install for over a month because of unresolved dependencies. How can anyone call this usable?
Now fast forward to April 2008, and the Ubuntu series of distributions has become a force to be reckoned with in the Linux community. Today, in Ubuntu, you will find a well polished, easy to used, and easy to extend, Linux distribution. I would highly recommend looking into this distribution I haven’t yet, and if your entertaining trying out Linux, this is the best place to start (especially with the new wubi feature).
Checkout the Ubuntu 8.04 and Kubuntu 8.04 release pages for details on all the new features.
Note: It’s also a good recommendation to read your post title BEFORE hitting the publish button…