Notes from the Ubuntu Developer Summit

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Oakland (California), Chris Kenyon, Canonical's Vice President of OEM Services, has predicted that Ubuntu will be running on five per cent of all PCs sold next year. According to Softpedia, Phoronix and other publications, Kenyon said in his talk that Ubuntu was shipped pre-installed on eight to ten million computers worldwide last year. Canonical expects this to increase to eighteen million next year, which they calculate to be five per cent of the total market.

In other news from the summit, Ubuntu developers are planning to fork the GNOME Control Center to create their own Ubuntu Control Center package. Other than GNOME Shell, it is planned that the installation CD for Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" will include almost all core components of GNOME 3.6, including Clutter. Up to now, Clutter has been missing from the default install which had forced the Ubuntu developers to include Totem 3.0 instead of 3.4 because the newer version depends on Clutter.

Phoronix reports that the Ubuntu developers had decided to drop the 2D version of Unity from the distribution. The Phoronix report is based on a quote from the online meeting notes of the GNOME session at UDS: "unity-2d will go away anyway, so -3d/compiz already require 3D". A post in the Phoronix forums concerning the story suggests that it seems likely that Canonical had at least initially decided to stop development of Unity 2D. According to the forum poster, the main developer has left Canonical and is now working for Blue Systems, the company that has recently taken over sponsorship of Kubuntu.

Phoronix is also reporting from a UDS session where representatives of Electronic Arts (EA) said that there are no plans to port any native games to Linux. EA recently began to distribute two browser games through the Ubuntu Software Center.

Ubuntu 12.10, which is currently scheduled to be released on 18 October, will most likely be using version 3.5 or 3.6 of the Linux kernel. The developers once again discussed how to prevent novice users from installing unsigned packages from untrusted sources, but it is unclear if a solution has been reached.

(fab)