Nice to see quality come first.

[d-cosner]

A week ago I installed Ubuntu 13.04 on two of my computers and upgraded them to 13.10 using the upgrade manager. Both computers are running very nice! Boot time is fantastic, the open source ATI drivers are working better than ever, Plymouth is displaying perfectly, all multimedia is playing great and the refinements to Unity are very nice. I used the upgrade manager because I did not have any disks to do a clean install and I have read that most people have had good results with this method recently, my results were very good.

I found two very minor bugs in 13.10, the redundant restart entry and flv files were not displaying as pictures in the dash. These were extremely minor problems and no worse than I would find in any given distribution. The restart bug was sort of fixed by an update, sometimes it would appear in the menu and sometimes it would not. This was very easily remedied using dconf editor and probably a future update will fix this anyway. Either way this was a very minor thing and it was not hurting anything.

I have not found a solution for the way flv files displaying in the dash but mp4's display just fine. Flv's played just fine but I like the pictures displaying in the dash. I just re-downloaded my music and saved it as mp4's, they take up less space anyway so it all worked out fine in the end. Oddly, the other computer I upgraded already had mp3's on it and the ones I had played are still displaying properly. All things considered the bugs I found in 13.10 were very minor, easily worked around and for upgrading rather than a clean install both computers run extremely well.

I am really pleased to see Canonical more focused on quality rather than cutting edge. I prefer quality over anything and have always tried to go with distributions that make this their main focus. I have read about the plans for 14.04 and am really pleased with the focus on refinements and stability. Certainly I would expect to see cutting edge things appearing in the non LTS releases after 14.04 is released but it is good to know that the next LTS will be more or less a more refined version of a very good 13.10 release.

My congratulations to Canonical and all that contributed to it's development. Ubuntu has finally made it to my very short list of quality distributions that I would recommend using.

[craig10x]

Yes...the quality is really excellent on Ubuntu now...even the 6 month versions have been outstanding...and hello to you over here, Don

[grier-devon]

If the Linux Action Show holds any truth to what they say then it will only get better. According to them for the next several releases we are to receive minimal new features and stability focused on what is currently in place. The only new features I know which may hurt stability will be Mir and Unity 8, but those are suppose to slowly get implemented in between 14.04 and 16.04 so we don't feel it like we did when Unity first came about 11.04.

For me personally 13.10 runs better and has less things crash then on 12.04.3, this is sad when a six month release is more stable for me then an LTS.

[d-cosner]

grier-devon, I hope The Linux Action Show is right! Now that I think about it Canonical has held back on MIR and Unity 8 until they are ready, they have been much more quality conscience since they started developing Unity on their own. Unity 7 has seen many nice incremental changes over the last few releases. 12.04 did have some lingering bugs that needed to be worked around but there are very few bugs in 13.10. Both computers I have 13.10 installed on are using open source graphics drivers and I am genuinely amazed at how well they are working!

So many things have changed, Unity came into existence, Steam has come to Linux along with some great game titles, the Steam Box is on it's way, more and more applications for purchase are appearing, all these great things are pushing the quality level upwards and Canonical seems to be responding to these demands. I few years ago I never would have imagined Canonical developing their own user interface but in my opinion it has made Ubuntu a much better distribution than it was when it used Gnome.

I also never would have imagined Ubuntu and elegance used in the same sentence but Unity seems more elegant than the Mac OS these days and that is quite an accomplishment. I am really looking forward to 14.04 and hoping it is even better than 13.10.

[grier-devon]

I am glad to hear your open source drivers have improved, probably has more to do with kernel 3.11 as new ATI drivers were implemented in there. 14.04 LTS is to be really boring because of stability (good thing), but we will be able to boot into Unity 8 to play with (unity 7 default) and we are getting new looking application icons for the default icon set to polish it up.

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/11/e...untu-14-04-lts