What's new in Ubuntu 13.04

Backstage

Probably the most notable work done within the belly of Ubuntu has to do with what the Ubuntu bigwigs refer to as "convergence." According to Jane Silber, CEO at Canonical, a lot of the development of this cycle has been concentrated on laying the groundwork to make Ubuntu for desktops play nicely with Ubuntu on other form factors, such as tablets, smartphones, and in the cloud.

Although a complete integration is not available yet, Raring Ringtail is the first step in that direction, and Canonical expects to have much better interoperability with their mobile version of the system from 13.10 onward.

What's Missing

The distro maintainers have decided to cut in half the support period, from 18 to 9 months, so instead of having support up to nearly the end of 2014, by this time next year Raring will be three months obsolete. This cut applies to all non-LTS versions from now onward, but LTS versions (e.g., 12.04) still come with five years of support. The Ubuntu wiki [2] lists when support for various versions of Ubuntu will run out.

Something else slashed from this release is Wubi, which allows you to install Ubuntu from within Windows and is one of the two least aggressive ways of trying out Ubuntu (the other being a Live disc – something you can still do with our cover disc). Wubi installs Ubuntu into a file within Windows. This file is then loop-mounted, as if it is on its own partition. Because of technical difficulties and numerous bugs, Wubi has been excluded this time around. It is expected to return in 13.10.

Readers who do not get the Live CD will miss the ShipIt service. Until recently, you could order an Ubuntu install CD and Canonical would send it to your home. That's gone now. This change is probably not very important for many people in the developed world, who have connection speeds high enough that downloading large ISO files is not too much of a hassle. The move is also environmentally sound and, with many machines shipping without DVD readers nowadays (a trend that is on the rise), it doesn't make much sense to support a dying format with a heavy carbon footprint. For rural users and people in developing countries, where connections to the Internet can be slow or spotty at best, this might not seem to be such a great idea.