Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” released

For the last sev­er­al years, the end of April has meant anoth­er release of Ubun­tu (the world’s most pop­u­lar GNU/Linux dis­tri­b­u­tion), and 2011 is no exception.

Yes­ter­day, Canon­i­cal — which spon­sors the devel­op­ment of Ubun­tu — announced the release of Ver­sion 11.04, code­named “Nat­ty Nar­whal”. Nat­ty suc­ceeds Mav­er­ick Meerkat, which was released back in Octo­ber 2010, and brings a host of changes across Ubun­tu’s many edi­tions and derivatives.

The change that most peo­ple are talk­ing about is the advent of Uni­ty, which is now the default shell in the reg­u­lar edi­tion of Ubun­tu. Uni­ty is not a replace­ment for Gnome, which has pro­vid­ed Ubun­tu’s desk­top envi­ron­ment for years; rather, it is a replace­ment for a part of Gnome. Uni­ty was orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped as a shell inter­face for net­books. Now it’s in the stan­dard fla­vor of Ubuntu.

Reac­tion to Canon­i­cal’s deci­sion to make Uni­ty a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of Ubun­tu has been mixed. There are those who love the change, and those who don’t like it at all. And there are a few folks in between. I’m one of them, because I don’t actu­al­ly use the stan­dard “fla­vor” of Ubun­tu. Instead, I use Kubuntu.

That “K” pre­fix stands for KDE, a pow­er­ful free soft­ware com­pi­la­tion that has under­gone a long evo­lu­tion since its cre­ation in 1996.

KDE is actu­al­ly more than just a desk­top envi­ron­ment, which is why the com­mu­ni­ty that devel­ops has begun call­ing it a soft­ware com­pi­la­tion.

Since KDE comes with its own beau­ti­ful, fea­ture-rich graph­i­cal shell called Plas­ma Work­spaces, Kubun­tu has no need for Unity.

(Uni­ty is tech­ni­cal­ly incom­pat­i­ble with the rest of KDE in any case, so even if Kubun­tu’s devel­op­ers want­ed to replace Plas­ma with it, they couldn’t).

Kubun­tu users are thus unaf­fect­ed by the changeover to Uni­ty. But that does­n’t mean that Kubun­tu 11.04 is devoid of new fea­tures. To the con­trary! Kubun­tu 11.04 includes KDE 4.6, the most pol­ished incar­na­tion of KDE 4 yet, along with Fire­fox 4, Libre­Of­fice 3.3.2, and updat­ed ver­sions of every major KDE appli­ca­tion (like Amarok, the music play­er, or KRDC, the remote desk­top client).

There are a great many sub­tle enhance­ments, from the clean­er and more intu­itive task man­ag­er to the improved search func­tions in Dol­phin (the file man­ag­er). Appli­ca­tions using the GTK toolk­it (Fire­fox, Inkscape) now look much nicer on Kubun­tu because they make use of KDE’s Oxy­gen artwork.

A con­sid­er­able num­ber of bugs have also been iden­ti­fied and fixed.

Changes com­mon to all Ubun­tu fla­vors include a new­er ver­sion of the Lin­ux ker­nel, a new­er ver­sion of the X.org Serv­er, sup­port for Intel’s Intel­li­gent Pow­er Shar­ing, and improve­ments to many major filesys­tems that Ubun­tu sup­ports, includ­ing ext4.

“Ubun­tu 11.04 offers excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for busi­ness­es to improve the reli­a­bil­i­ty, secu­ri­ty and man­age­abil­i­ty of desk­top, cloud and serv­er deploy­ments, chal­leng­ing the tra­di­tion­al license or sub­scrip­tion fee mod­el and embrac­ing open-source tech­nol­o­gy,” said Canon­i­cal CEO Jane Sil­ber in a state­ment.

In my view, Nat­ty is very much a worth­while upgrade. Although there was some doubt as to whether the Ubun­tu devel­op­ers could get Uni­ty work­ing well by release day, the late reviews of the stan­dard fla­vor have been gen­er­al­ly positive.

And Kubun­tu Nat­ty? Well, it rocks! 🙂 It’s faster, more reli­able, more pow­er­ful… an upgrade in every sense. If you’re an Ubun­tu user and you find that you don’t like Uni­ty, con­sid­er mak­ing the jump to Kubun­tu. Try out Plas­ma Desk­top. Dis­cov­er its many strengths for yourself.

Hap­py downloading!