Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, the development of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn has already started. For now, Ubuntu 14.10 is the same system as Ubuntu 14.04 (using Kernel 3.13), but with some under-development additions, but the Canonical developers are about to adopt Kernel 3.15 soon.
Matthias Klose, the man responsable with the GCC support for Debian and Ubuntu has recently announced that GCC 4.9, which been released in April, will be used as the default compiler for C, C++, Objective-C, and Objective-C++ on Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn and Debian. For more information, see the mailing lists.
As you already know, the stable version of Ubuntu 14.10 Trusty Tahr is scheduled for release on the 16th of October 2014, and there isn’t much information about Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn, more will be published after the UDS 14.06 (Ubuntu Developer Summit).
But if everything happens as announced at the previous UDS, Unity 8 (over X.org) will be implemented on Ubuntu 14.10, while Mir will be already usable by October 2014 (Mir 0.2.0 getting prepared for Ubuntu 14.10), despite the fact that it will get set by default on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, along with systemd, which will replace Canonical’s Upstart init system. A demo video of both Unity 8 (Mir) and Unity 7 (X11) running on Ubuntu 14.04 is available.
Canonical will develop in parallel Ubuntu 14.10 for desktop and for mobile (the development of Ubuntu Touch has already switched to Ubuntu 14.10, as code base), while they will maintain Ubuntu 14.04 and most likely try to bring the new features of Ubuntu Touch to the desktop system of Ubuntu, to be closer to convergence.
For those who don’t know, Mark Shuttleworth’s target is to achieve a full desktop-mobile convergence somewhere between the releases of Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 15.04. And to make Ubuntu the first converged system.
The idea of convergence is to create an unique system, capable of running on both a desktop and mobile device. Ubuntu’s convergence has been demoed by Jono Bacon, Ubuntu’s Community Manager, via the Weather App and the Karma Machine.
