Today was perhaps a big day in the open-source world, with at least two major releases that I’m aware of. The Mozilla project released version 2.0 of Mozilla Thunderbird, their premier e-mail application. Perhaps the bigger story, however, is that Ubuntu released version 7.04 of its popular GNU/Linux distribution.

As far as Thunderbird goes, the release is sort of lost on me. I’ve been running betas and release candidates for at least a month or two, so I can no longer recall what the major changes were for me. Since I tend to use it as little more than a glorified IMAP client, I don’t necessarily use a lot of the more interesting features like spam detection or message tagging.

I installed Ubuntu last night in a virtual machine, and I’m becoming more impressed with the distribution with every release cycle. It’s definitely a very polished system, and one of the first things I noticed was the restricted drivers manager. Since the virtual machine doesn’t require any restricted drivers, I didn’t have the opportunity to try it out, however. Even so, the six month lull between major releases is perhaps the biggest reason I would stray away from Ubuntu personally. I know backports can help somewhat with that, but especially with major libraries, that doesn’t help so much. Maybe I just need to lose the bleeding-edge mentality. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive release, and I expect it’ll only continue to get better. I’ll probably be staying with Gentoo myself for now, but I’m certainly open to change.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 11:47 am and is filed under Linux, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.