Saturday, April 13, 2013

Ubuntu 13.04 Beta 2

Ubuntu 13.04 is currently in final Beta. We'll be seeing Ubuntu 13.04 released near the end of April, as per usual. I'm going ahead and upgrading my PC to 13.04. I'm pretty sure the GPU performance will suck at least until there's a Catalyst version supporting the new Ubuntu release but, oh well...

Update Manager at work

It's too bad we won't be seeing the just in UVD support for Radeon GPUs. I'd have liked to use the open source driver over the closed source alternative. It's simply easier to maintain for the end user.

Even getting the compute support for my HD 7750 would be a nice bonus. It's not useful yet, but once driver support is there we'll be able to start seeing software making use of it.

It's definitely too early to consider replacing X.org with Mir but it looks like Canonical is moving full steam ahead with Mir, at least for now. Unity Next is already able to run on Mir so progress is exceptionally fast. We'll see how that pans out in a few years. For now, we're still on good ol' X.org with an updated Unity shell in Ubuntu 13.04.

Even so we're getting plenty of updates, and that's a good thing.

The kernel gets an update, as usual. More unusually, Upstart is getting an update. Ubuntu 12.10 is still on 1.5 although newer versions have been around for longer. Ubuntu 13.04 is getting an upgrade to version 1.8.

Ubuntu 13.04's new shut down window

Oh, and we're changing the way we're shutting down. Again. Now it actually looks like it's fitting in with Unity. As it should.

Unfortunately, not everything's getting an upgrade this time round. Gnome 3.6 is still being used despite Gnome 3.8 being available. A Gnome3 PPA (for those who want Gnome 3.8 anyway) is available.

You can see all the details in the Technical Overview.

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