Ubuntu Look

Mark Shuttleworth is tap-dancing to work these days, he writes on his blog. Why? His Ubuntu Linux project has hired a team of “designers, user experience champions, and interaction design visionaries” tasked with the heady chore of making Linux the world’s most usable operating system.

After acknowledging the significance of the challenge, Shuttleworth admitted that he does not yet have all the answers. But, he said Ubuntu’s new “upstream” team — which will work separately from its “platform” team, to avoid conflicts of interest — would focus initially on participation in the X, OpenGL, GTK, Qt, GNOME, and KDE projects.

Read more at DesktopLinux

Faithful readers of this column may remember news we reported back in early April that the next Ubuntu release had been cunningly named “Jabbering Jackass.” The news came from a memo that got leaked to the Linux Loop, the story went, and it was, of course, an April Fools’ Day joke — which we knew all along. Anyhoo, turns out the *real* next version of Canonical’s very excellent software — sans the “cuddly cartoon donkey” — will be Jaunty Jackalope, as Mark Shuttleworth himself announced on a mailing list post last week.

Read more at LinuxInsider