Edi­tor’s note: If the terms GNU and Lin­ux don’t mean any­thing to you, this post is prob­a­bly going to read like a bunch of gib­ber­ish. Sor­ry. But do read on if you’re inter­est­ed in learn­ing more about the won­der­ful world of free software. 

Free soft­ware enthu­si­asts, it’s time to rev up your Advanced Pack­ag­ing Tool instances! Ubun­tu 15.04 and Kubun­tu 15.04 “Vivid Vervet” have land­ed, and Debian 8.0 “Jessie” is not far behind. That means it’s time to update — unless your machine is  run­ning a Long-Term Sup­port (LTS) release for max­i­mum stability.

It’s rare that Ubun­tu and its deriv­a­tives sees a major release in the same week as its com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven par­ent, Debian. Both Ubun­tu and Debian uti­lize the GNU tool­chain and the Lin­ux ker­nel to pro­vide an oper­at­ing sys­tem that is incred­i­bly robust, pow­er­ful, and large­ly free of pro­pri­etary software.

Ubun­tu, though bet­ter known, is based on Debian and makes use of its many inno­va­tions, includ­ing the Advanced Pack­ag­ing Tool, bet­ter known as apt, which makes installing sys­tem and appli­ca­tion updates a breeze.

While Ubun­tu sees a new release no mat­ter what every six months — com­plete with wacky code­names like “Vivid Vervet” — Debian gen­er­al­ly only sees a new major release every two years. That means this Sat­ur­day’s planned release of Debian 8.0 “Jessie” is a real­ly, real­ly big deal. Debian releas­es, by the way, are named for char­ac­ters in Dis­ney’s Toy Sto­ry fran­chise; the cur­rent 7.0 release is aliased wheezy.

Today’s release of Ubun­tu 15.04 does­n’t bring a lot of changes to the Ubun­tu user inter­face. Most of the improve­ments are under-the-hood, such as the adop­tion of sys­temd, which has proven to be some­what con­tro­ver­sial, even though most users will prob­a­bly like it because it means faster boot times.

Nev­er­the­less, there are a few user-fac­ing refine­ments, like new default wall­pa­per and the restora­tion of menus to their prop­er place under­neath appli­ca­tion title bars.

The big­ger user-fac­ing changes this time around can be found in Ubun­tu’s sis­ter Kubun­tu. Kubun­tu has been sail­ing above the chaos that has been the imple­men­ta­tion of Uni­ty in the default Ubun­tu fla­vor for years, qui­et­ly mov­ing to the lat­est iter­a­tion of the KDE Soft­ware Com­pi­la­tion with each pass­ing release.

How­ev­er, last year, the KDE Soft­ware Com­pi­la­tion’s devel­op­ers decid­ed to make the com­pi­la­tion more mod­u­lar, and allow its major com­po­nents to be devel­oped more inde­pen­dent­ly, at their own pace. Hence, the many KDE projects are now col­lec­tive­ly referred to under the title KDE Frame­works.

For this release, Kubun­tu is break­ing seri­ous new ground by mak­ing KDE’s new, cut­ting-edge Plas­ma 5 desk­top envi­ron­ment (which is one of the afore­men­tioned frame­works) the default. Kubun­tu users who choose to upgrade to 15.04 will notice right away that their desk­tops look quite different.

Plas­ma 5 ships with an airy, beau­ti­ful, and col­or­ful theme called Breeze.

“Plas­ma 5, the next gen­er­a­tion of KDE’s desk­top has been rewrit­ten to make it smoother to use while retain­ing the famil­iar set­up. The sec­ond set of updates to Plas­ma 5 are now sta­ble enough for every­day use and is the default in this ver­sion of Kubun­tu.” — The Kubun­tu developers

It’s also got an updat­ed build of Libre­Of­fice. While Libre­Of­fice is not a KDE appli­ca­tion, many Kubun­tu users (myself includ­ed) make heavy use of it.

I’m cer­tain­ly look­ing for­ward to see­ing Plas­ma 5 improve. Per­haps some­time in the next year, KDE and Mozil­la can fig­ure out how to improve Fire­fox inte­gra­tion into KDE. There was a big dis­cus­sion about this last year and it seems to have sparked some renewed inter­est in coop­er­a­tion. That would be very welcome.

Debian devel­op­ers are spend­ing their week get­ting Jessie prepped for release. As is com­mon with a major new Debian release, a large num­ber of pack­ages are get­ting updates, and many new pack­ages are being intro­duced. A small­er num­ber of pack­ages are being obso­let­ed. A recent sta­tus report from Steve McIn­tyre goes over some of the things that are get­ting atten­tion from devel­op­ers ahead of the big day.

Read­ers who aren’t techies might won­der why we care so much about what’s hap­pen­ing with Ubun­tu, Kubun­tu, and Debian. Why are these releas­es news­wor­thy, and what do these oper­at­ing sys­tems have to do with pro­gres­sive politics?

The answer is that Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Debian are a crit­i­cal part of the soft­ware stack that runs most of the machines NPI’s web­sites are served from, not to men­tion most of my own com­put­ers. Because we at NPI believe in liv­ing our val­ues and walk­ing our talk, we have made a con­scious choice to use Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Debian, which prin­ci­pal­ly con­sist of soft­ware that is free, unlike Mac or Windows.

Free soft­ware, or libre soft­ware, refers to soft­ware that respects your free­dom as a user. In the famous words of Richard Stall­man, think free speech, not free beer.

Free soft­ware sys­tems are released under licens­es that allows any­one to share with a friend, look at their source code to study how they work, and make improve­ments if they want. If improve­ments are made and pub­licly released, they must be released under the same license. (This is known as the share-alike principle.)

Most free soft­ware is released under a license like the GNU GPL. The set of free­doms that this license — and many oth­ers like it — are based on is as fol­lows:

0. The free­dom to run the pro­gram as you wish, for any purpose.
1. The free­dom to study how the pro­gram works, and change it so it does your com­put­ing as you wish. Access to the source code is a pre­con­di­tion for this.
2. The free­dom to redis­trib­ute copies so you can help your neighbor.
3. The free­dom to dis­trib­ute copies of your mod­i­fied ver­sions to oth­ers. By doing this you can give the whole com­mu­ni­ty a chance to ben­e­fit from your changes. Access to the source code is a pre­con­di­tion for this.

The phi­los­o­phy that under­pins free soft­ware is based on the same val­ues and prin­ci­ples that pro­gres­sive pol­i­tics are based on, includ­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty, trust, coop­er­a­tion, and mutu­al respon­si­bil­i­ty. It only makes sense that pro­gres­sives should use and be evan­ge­lists for free soft­ware. Hence, this post.

While I’m on the sub­ject of free soft­ware releas­es, I’d be remiss not to men­tion that Word­Press, which is anoth­er huge­ly impor­tant part of our soft­ware stack, saw a major update today with the release of Ver­sion 4.2, code­named Pow­ell.

Word­Press is the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem that pow­ers the Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate, as well as In Brief and many of our oth­er projects.

Like Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Debian, it is free soft­ware. Word­Press gets along very well with those oper­at­ing sys­tems and libre web servers like Apache and nginx that are installed along with them as part of a serv­er soft­ware stack.

(The oper­at­ing sys­tem runs the com­put­er, the web­serv­er han­dles requests for resources from the Inter­net and pass­es them to appli­ca­tions like WordPress.)

So, hap­py release day to every­one who is a part of Ubuntu/Kubuntu and Word­Press. Debian devs, we’re look­ing for­ward to con­grat­u­lat­ing you as well, when you get Jessie shipped — hope­ful­ly, this Sat­ur­day as planned.

Our sin­cere thanks to all the won­der­ful peo­ple who give of their time, tal­ent, and trea­sure to make free soft­ware. The free soft­ware com­mu­ni­ty is proof that human­i­ty can do amaz­ing things togeth­er in spite of our many differences.