Finally after much hype , the latest LTS’d version of Ubuntu is here, 14.04. I had been a Debian fan for long and was waiting eagerly for the release of 14, with a hope Ubuntu would eradicate the common bugs and issues which i have been facing in late versions.  It comes out with GNOME 3.10, although many expected GNOME 3.12 desktop would be shipped in. Yes Ubuntu 14 looks just like the previous versions, whether it be 13.10 or 12.04. Also, Unity ( shell interface for the GNOME ) hasn’t been upgraded to 8 and the latest version of Ubuntu is running with unity 7. 

In this case however, there  is an enhanced support for online accounts.

Just provide your online account and you will not have to bother about signing in separately to email clients or chat clients. Just grant Ubuntu access and you find it running smoothly. That said, the online accounts is easily optimized for providing better UI than the previous ones. The dash and searches — you will love them as more specific search needs are met both within your system and over the internet.

Look-wise, nothing great have changed with Ubuntu 14.04. Performance wise, speed of operation seems to be improved.

Bugs ? 🙂 with a thought, i booted Ubuntu 14 for the first time and this is what I got!

“Error: diskfilter writes are not supported.
Press any key to continue…”

Check out this here, if you face this issue :

https://bugs./ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1274320

Glad news is that Canonical will be supporting this desktop Linux for five years. Coming to the technical aspects, the kernel used is the Linux 3.13 kernel, which focus on enhancing the security aspects as well as  limiting the power consumption on individual components.

There has been a tremendous effort in order to save the power drain which existing in some arch’s for the previous versions.  According to the Ubuntu feature’s list, there is an introduction of the IntelPowerClamp driver for improved power efficiency. 

And yes, I’m able to see appreciable power efficiency in my Thinkpad-510.

I have not yet tried much custom apps on Ubuntu. The LibreOffice suite has been updated to the latest version, 4.2, in which especially LibreOffice Calc has got more features and looks simple which might slowly rub the headache of user’s who always wanted MS-office when thinking of the complicated behavior of Libreoffice.

All in all, it looks promising. A revised version of older Ubuntu with considerable improvements. However, will this be a replacement for winXP ? Have to wait and watch !