April 26th was a very big day for Ubuntu users as it marks the release of Precise Pangolin (12.04), which is very important for Ubuntu because:1. It is an LTS release.
2. It is the first LTS release with Unity.
3. The focus of this release has been tweaking and polishing Unity so that it qualifies for LTS status.
Note: I know this is quite late but I was half finished with this article on release date before I got a gigantic amount of assignments.
I Major Changes
1. HUD (Heads up Display)
This will surely benefit keyboard addicts. Pressing the ALT key within any application allows you to type and search for a command within an application. This is especially useful on programs like Inkscape or GIMP which have a very extensive network of menus.
2. Libreoffice 3.5
The best open-source Office Suite got even better. There are many new features including:
- New Header/Footer UI
- Auto Updating word count dialog (Yay!)
- Better grammar checker
- Better support for Microsoft Office 2007 file formats including improved support for SmartArt.
- Added support for importing the .vsd (Microsoft Visio) file format.
3. Renewed Support for Gnome Classic
You can use your desktop the way you used to in the Gnome 2 days by installing gnome-panel and logging back in under the Gnome classic desktop environment.
4. Unity Lens improvements
Applications
You can now disable the results that show up from the Ubuntu Software Center.Files
The file lens now allows you to search for files in your home folder in this release.
Music
More categories have been added, such as sorting by decade, genre or source.Video
This is a completely new lens and lets you search videos from a wide variety of online sources including Youtube movies, BBC, TED talks, Vimeo and Dailymotion. Clicking on the search results will open the video in your default browser.
5. Keyboard Shortcuts Overlay
If you keep pressing the super key, you will see that a translucent overlay will appear and summarize the keyboard shortcuts in Unity.
5. Better Multi-monitor Support
You can now configure which monitor to have the unity launcher on as well as enable sticky edges, which causes a window to resist for a while beforeswitching monitors.
6. New QT interface for Ubuntu
Ubuntu One will be more easily cross platform thanks to the QT framework. One could still say that the interface still needs some more polish to match the rest of the desktop.
7. Ubuntu Software Center changes
The Ubuntu Software Center has been reported as having faster startup times and being less resource heavy than previous versions.A new category has also been added for books and magazines. Additionally, if you enable the recommendations feature, Ubuntu will also show you software that is similar to the ones that you have already installed.
8. Better Power Management (RC6)
New power management techniques dramatically lower power usage whilst your computer is idle, prolonging battery life. The drop in battery usage (while the computer is idle) amounts to 40-60%.9. Privacy tool
The Zeitgeist privacy tool allows you to customize how you would like your files to be logged including settings to choose file formats or folders to ignore.II. Minor Changes
Precise Pangolin is after all, all about polishing. Let's have a look at some of the minor changes
1. Unity Dash and Notify-OSD improvements
The Unity Dash and notification bubbles that pop up will now adjust their colour based on the colour of your current wallpaper so that there is less of a clash between the notification bubbles and background.
2. LightDM
LightDM, Ubuntu's display manager, now uses the wallpaper that you have chosen as the background so that the transition to your desktop is more pleasing.
3. Support for Gnome Application Single Menus
Support for the single button menus is also available on Ubuntu. This will show Gnome Applications like Web (Epiphany), Documents and Contacts the way that they were meant to be shown.
4. Unity Launcher
The Unity launcher is always shown by default but you do have the ability to turn on autohide as well under Settings > Appearance > Behavior . In addition, the size of icons on the Unity Launcher can also be resized.
A loading bar is displayed while an application is installed and it wiggles slightly after installation.
Right-clicking on the Ubuntu button gives you a quicklist to all of the Unity lenses.
5. Active vs. Background windows
Background windows are now given a slightly faded look in Ubuntu to make the active windows stand out more.
In tandem with the theme of Precise Pangolin, the biggest change is probably experiencing and all around better, more stable, more usable Unity. There are probably other minor changes that I might have missed out. Please let me know if I have missed out something.
This article is an accompaniment to a review that I will be doing later on. It will help the review if I can just straight into my own experience without giving a lengthy introduction about new features.
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