10.10

Today is an auspicious day. The date, being 10-10-10 (depending on which format you use) is apparently binary for 42, being the answer to the Question. It is also the day Ubuntu 10.10 has been released to the world and it looks like an even better release than the previous version, 6 months ago.

Update: I just came across the Meerkat release announcement and had to share it:

Some time ago a group of hyper-intelligent pan dimensional beings decided to finally answer the great question of Life, The Universe and Everything. To this end, a small band of these Debians built an incredibly powerful distribution, Ubuntu. After this great computer programme had run (a very quick 3 million minutes…or 6 years) the answer was announced. The Ultimate answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is…42, and in its’ purest form 101010. Which suggests that what you really need to know is ‘What was the Question?’. The great distribution kindly pointed out that what the problem really was that no-one knew the question. Accordingly, the distribution designed a set of successors, marked by a circle of friends…to ultimately bring Unity to all things living…Ubuntu 10.10, to find the question to the ultimate answer.

I’m downloading the latest release right now and my plan is to install it on a virtual machine using VirtualBox and play around with it. As nice as it may be, I doubt it is nearly enough to persuade me to abandon Mac OS X but it may be perfect for a secondary machine at my office.

Between Dropbox, OpenOffice.org (sort of renamed to LibreOffice for now) and all the cloud based services there aren’t too many reasons not to seriously look at Ubuntu as an office production OS these days.

The one big app I would miss on Ubuntu is Evernote (although I am sure there are options for Ubuntu). I would also miss iTunes with the iTunes Store but that is hardly essential for a work machine. Most of my music is DRM-free and could be ported across to whatever Ubuntu uses and a better Android phone with more storage could become my media device too. None of these options are as polished or seamless as the iTunes/Mac combo but if I was shopping for a very low cost option, Ubuntu would probably be it.

I am quite excited to get the Ubuntu VM running and play around with it. I think there are probably going to be a number of things about Ubuntu 10.10 I will really like. My bias towards open source software from a philosophical perspective also pushes me to keep trying it out, as good as Windows 7 is proving itself to be. A part of me will always hanker for a really well produced open source operating system. Its a big reason I prefer Android over iOS (although being open source hasn’t saved Symbian in my estimation).

Anyway, enough of that. Back to waiting for that download.

Happy 10.10 day geeks!