New Ubuntu in 9 days, 18 hours, 51 minutes and 29 seconds

Here are the beta 2 release notes: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/TechnicalOverview/Beta...

I probably missed it; what's so radical about this release? It's not even an LTS.

Except it's 11/10/11 or 10/11/11 depending on where you live.

LTS releases are actually pretty boring, for obvious reasons.

Unity is probably getting more usable. It's now got a pretty built-in backup tool. The App store thingy is better. There's something called juju, which is a "DevOps" branded deployment package, or something. It uses words "cloud", "DevOps", "charms" (wtf?) and so on, and is probably just a wrapper on apt-get, but hey, we all need new buzzwords (and I'll look into it if it stops me shooting myself in the foot too much).

Also, the lightweight distros are probably getting to the "heavy enough to use, but not too Spartan" stage that the Gnome haters want, but will become bloated in 2 years time (and the anti-bloat crowd will jump onto xmonad or something ... why can't they just maximize a terminal?).

The more things change ...

Let me call it this time... This is the year of Desktop linux :D

Oh my god is that embarrassing.

Some meaningless marketing spew, some social network stealth tracking widgets, and not a single link to any meaningful information. After the recent interresting design choices, the unity disaster and now this it is probably time to look for a distribution that doesn't think of it's users as mindless drones easily distracted by empty shiny things. Any recommendations?